Regular readers will be aware of my relationship with the Job Centre. It is important (they sign a form, I get my mortgage insurance back), but not vital (I do not need my Jobseekers' Allowance). However, it is rapidly (like the parking ticket from Hackney Council) becoming a relationship that continues as a matter of principle rather than necessity.
Job Centre Plus is staffed by people who cannot get jobs elsewhere, not even in factories pulling giblets out of chickens or washing carrots. People whose brains have been removed and replaced with fudge and cotton wool, who ask me if I've filled my forms in myself and stand chatting in clumps whilst The Unemployed gather in confused mounds. People who give you differing 'advice', depending on what time of day it is; whose only answer is another form; whose last resort is a quiet acknowledgement that "it's a miracle anything ever gets done".
Bearing in mind I paid enough income tax last year to keep most of London in Jobseeker's Allowance for the next ten years, I was overjoyed to receive the following letter this morning:
Dear NWM
YOUR CLAIM FOR JOBSEEKER'S ALLOWANCE
We cannot pay you jobseeker's allowance from 15 December 2005.
We cannot pay you because you have not paid, or been credited with, enough Class 1 National Insurance Contributions.
We have used the tax years ending 5 April 2004 and 5 April 2005 to assess your claim.
We may still credit you with Class 1 National Insurance contributions if you continue to attend the Jobcentre.
I don't cry much. I weep with frustration, or when someone succeeds on Faking It, or baby elephants die on the Attenborough programmes. I cried a bit last Saturday in a good-but-scary way. But the Job Centre makes me cry once a week. Either it's an hour spent filling out the wrong form and being spoken to as if I'm a cretin, or letters that make no sense, or conversations with midgets in wigs that mean Nothing and make no difference to anything at all, or letters like this that say 'no' for reasons you didn't think could possibly BE reasons, like "You cannot cross the road because THERE ARE NO ROADS", or "You cannot go to the hairdresser because YOU DO NOT HAVE A HEAD".
Perhaps Job Centres are the most democratic places of all. The more educated you are, the more compliant, the better you fill out your forms, the more employable you are, the more carefully-photocopied stuff you provide them with, the more polite you are, the more income tax and National Insurance you've paid over the years, and the fewer times you've claimed any kind of state benefit, the less likely you are to get it if you actually do need it and the more likely they are to make you weep with rage.
I think I'm turning right wing and middle-aged. And somehow, suddenly I don't care.
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9 comments:
How very frustrating. Have they got a telephone helpline? I find that the people who man those tend to be marginally more helpful than those who deal with the face to face stuff.
I reckon it might be because they have to demonstrate that they can use a telephone the right way round before they get the job.
Or maybe I am horribly behind the times.
Very similar to US unemployment offices. The first meeting they empathize with you and try to boost your ego, by the sixth or seventh week they suddenly are hard to reach by phone and not encouraging. I took one of their surveys and they said I should be an animal insemination specialist. From secretary to animal husbandry specialist-really helped the ego :-( Don't let those morons get you down NWM!
I sympathise. I once attempted to briefly sign on during a freelance dry spell so that I could get some course fees paid. But, despite having paid thousands of pounds of class 2 & 4 NI whilst self-employed, exactly equivalent to what an employed person would pay in class 1, apparently class 2 & 4 is a special magic type of NI that you can pay all your self-employed life, but never get back in the form of any kind of benefit. The irony being that after being made redundant I could have quite legitimately lived off the state for a while thanks to recent class 1 payments, but no, having self-worth and not wanting to be a burden to my fellow citizens I had to go and create my own job out of nothing, didn't I?
So I just had a quite nice chat with the woman at the JobCentre (I think that I made a pleasant change from her usual clients) and paid for the course myself. Would have been nice though.
Hmm. I thought I had let the anger go, but now that you have reminded me of the experience (thanks), all I can think about is the hours I spent filling out those endless coloured forms and how I now, three years later, want to go and torch the place.
Weirdly, I hated writing that post because I didn't want to be spilling bile all over my blog.
And I'm sorry if it's brought back Dark Memories.
But oddly, dear Salvadore, you have made me feel a lot better - in that "I'm not going mad, am I? It is actually shit, isn't it?" sort of way.
I resent wasting my life feeing angry most of all. I wasted a good 2 hours of my life this morning being really angry about it in that 'helpless in the face of dastardly bureaucracy' way. My only consolations are:
- that anyone working in a job centre is having a fucking awful time
- that you must be fucking desperate to work in a job centre
- that anyone working on the kind of government policy that creates the mindless fuckwittery that is the insane, non-sensical bureaucracy of - what is it, benefits? welfare? - is probably depressed, earning very little money, and hoping to retire to the Isle of Man with a scallop-catching business
- that however desperate I become, I will never, ever have to do what they do
- that you never, ever hear of someone who 'came good' from having a job in a job centre or working on government employment policy.
It's the only thing that keeps me sane, like people being fucking idiots in call centres. Every single second of their day is far worse than any second of my day (unless I'm having a smear test).
It's mean, it's something to do with schadenfreude, but fuck me, if it wasn't for that, I would by now be insane.
"So what kind of salary are you prepared to accept?", they asked me last week. "Oh", I said, "I wouldn't consider less than 150". "What, a day?", they said. "No", I said, "£150,000 a year". It was fun, even if not entirely true.
My little brother has Aspergers and is in receipt of incapacity benefit. Every two months ago a letter arrives informing him that his payments are to be stopped, typically for some obscure and arcane reason that has no legal, logical or factual basis whatsoever.
I have immense difficulties understanding the letters, which tend to be convoluted, nonsensical and grammatically meaningless. Which is, of course, exactly the sort of letter that you would send to someone with learning difficulties who depends upon the fortnightly pittance you grudgingly send him to, er, live.
Oh hey, now I'm angry too.
I'll get the torches.
Right. Hold on. What happens if enough articulate people are angry?
I'm just sayin'.
And cross enough again - having read this - to want to do something.
And there was me thinking I wasn't political and that.
Of course, the simplest answer is to get a camera, a number of compliant bloggers, two or three targets who work somewhere in Whitehall - or possibly Millbank - and to just keep going and going and going and going.
I'm up for it if anyone else is.
I was with you right up until the articulate bit...
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