Stupid things people have actually said to you.

[TordelBack]

There are many committed people working at Job Centres who genuinely do want to help people back into work.

No argument there - I've met plenty of good guys there, some of whom even greet you with a smile: for example the lady I was dealing with today was polite and helpful and looked mortified on her return from receiving the party line In Back but still managed to be pleasant and apologetic in delivering the madness.  Most of my issues have arisen from explicit policies and simple backroom bureaucratic cock-up.

I have however over the course of my dealings identified three characters out of the whole cast who are terrifyingly hostile and/or intimidating: the pink blouse lady who appears to deliberately misinterpret every single sentence as if you were unintentionally uttering profanities in a new language; clinically depressed lady who never rises above a monotone and assures you that whatever it is you want is almost certainly impossible even though you did it last week; and inappropriately aggressive mad-hair lady who simply shouts at you to go to another window, which when you eventually get to it is always the wrong window. 

I'm sure they all have ghastly life-stories and authoritarian edicts informing their behaviour, but when I happen to see my number synching with any of those folk's imminent availability I just go to the back of the queue and try again.

[SuperSurfer]

Yes, I also meant to add that there are Job Centre jobsworth staff whose mission, it seems, is to make the difficult task of looking for work in a recession an even more miserable experience.

[Professor Bear]

The one who sent me on that unnecessary course was not only truculent and hostile, but she actually hid in the back of the office when the course manager sent me back to have her explain to me what she'd done wrong - which I know because a friend I've known since high school who works in that office - and who is a lovely person by all accounts - told me all about it.  I am not the first to get the five-star treatment, and it's common consensus I won't be the last.

[Dandontdare]

Agreed, however nice the poor beleaguered staff are, the driving motive from top-down isn't helping people just getting 'em off benefits. Thatcher pioneered this technique by changing the method of counting every 6 months so it looked like the jobless total was falling when actually they just stopped including certain categories of people. Nowadays the method seems to be making things so ridiculously complex and contradictory that you either get shafted or give up and go away.

Have you heard the latest about the lying survey from the 'nudge' unit? http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/30/jobseekers-bogus-psychometric-tests-unemployed and an update here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/may/06/jobseekers-psychometric-test-failure

Anyone who can remain in the system, for any length of time must have great bureaucratic, problem solving and negotiating skills, so are ironically very employable!

I once had a restart interview (remember those?) with a lovely, burned out middle-aged chap on the verge of retirement. he guided me through the form advising the best things to say and which boxes not to tick (" that one's a trap - if you tick that one, even if it's true, you'll automatically get cut off and have to appeal")

[Trout]

Bloody hell, Tordel. This almost makes me relieved that I'm looking for work in a country where I don't qualify for benefit payments at all. In fact, I barely know a soul here, I'm on a learning curve so steep that it defies belief and - as I discovered this morning - when I do get an interview I can't even drive to it without getting horribly lost. (Edited to add: it wasn't a disaster after all, although it nearly was!)

Good for you for working out a solution! Soon you'll have all the elderly ladies you can handle! 

[I, Cosh]

With this and the bank thing I can't figure out if you're living in some strange Borgesian farce or a Kafkaesque tragedy. Either way, my sympathies.

[TordelBack]

Soon you'll have all the elderly ladies you can handle! 

I'm already at saturation point with 'none', but thanks! 

You're a braver man than most, Trout.  Just goes to show it isn't true what they say about bullies and other tyrants.

Aye Cosh, 'farce' covers it nicely, although as should be apparent it is largely one of my own making.  I'm hoping it turns out to be one of those ones where I get caught wearing the vicar's wife's negligee and could give a perfectly rational explanation if only my teeth weren't superglued together after a mix-up at the bakestall. 

I do regularly think that I've plumbed the depths of stupidity available at this end of things, but I'm always amazed to find I'm only a novice. 

(In breaking news this very afternoon I did finally get an e-mail reply from my bank branch (where I've had my main account since 1989, customer loyalty fans), informing me that the all-new 'mortgage resolution liaison' person I had been directed to a fortnight ago has actually been on leave since mid-April and won't be back until 27th May.  This is the person who is filling in for my previous contact, who was on leave so long that no-one in the branch remembers her. No alternative contact was provided, and no suggestion of what I should do in the interim.  One might conclude they don't give a sh*t, so it's hard to feel otherwise).

[maryanddavid]

Soul sapping as it may be TB the only thing they understand is the Squeaky wheel.
Keep ringing, when you get someone ask for their supervisor, at the start of EVERY phone call tell them you are recording the call (Like they do on their TaC). People dont like hassel and will pass it up the line, it has worked for me on a few occasions.

David

[Professor Bear]

Kill them, Tordel.  Kill them all.

[TordelBack]

Kill them, Tordel.  Kill them all.

Finally, I can put a name to the voices!

[Professor Bear]

With fire.

[staticgirl]

I had a casual job at the jobcentres in the 90s and even then we had targets to put people 'into administration' (the euphemism for cutting them off) which were higher than the targets for getting people into a job. As I knew I wouldn't be working for them past 9 months I didn't give a feck about the targets and was like that retired bloke guiding people through the forms minefield, especially the holiday forms which were worded in such a way that the slightest wrong move and the person would be cut off as not available - sometimes people's mums would buy them a wee holiday in Spain and they would tell me so then I would try to convince them to put down they were in Cornwall as one step outside the country and they were in the bin. Some of these people really deserved a break.

It's probably so much worse now. I know the morale in the DWP is absolutely terrible and they fear the Universal Credit scheme because of how it is being operated just in the small pilot area.

[opaque]

Also, I'm pretty sure an appointment requires the agreement of two parties. 

Nope, it's an arrangement between you of course but if you want something that someone is offering they expect you to do what they say. You can always say no to it but then you could lose out. In other circumstances a company could loose out if they didn't allow flexibility, if they were trying to sell you something for example.

So I don't see how I'm missing an appointment by requesting a different time prior to giving my agreement.

Because your existing agreement with them is that you appear when they say so. Unless you are actually at an interview nothing else matters. They simply think if you don't want to accept these rules then bugger off.
If you are not available for an interview etc then you would not be available for a job so screw you.
Very basic ideas of course but you can see how it's also true, if utterly stupid when you can prove you are actually doing something useful to help get a job!

I had similar issues years ago and ended up taking the risk and dropping out totally rather than having to do useless stuff for no money and luckily I managed to get a job not too long afterwards. But you just have to stick to the rules to keep going.

[TordelBack]

You're exactly right there, Opaque, wisdom matched only by your taste in pages of art.

Again and again I find myself getting irrationally frustrated because I subconsciously expect employment services to act as if we were partners or colleagues, adults working together to get something done, when it is essentially an adversarial relationship, or at best one in which I am penitent supplicant, rather than someone who stayed out of and happily funded this system for a quarter century and hopefully will do so again.  I think I felt better disposed to this relationship when I was actually suckling at the teat receiving benefits - now that all I can hope to look for it to do is (the as yet unrealised potential) to assist with training and business setup, I'm finding it pretty grating to still have to present myself as a beggar.

The replacement of trust and compromise with suspicion and inflexibility is probably an inevitable consequence of running an exploitable social welfare system, but it is a difficult mental adjustment for me to make, and I suspect ultimately one that encourages deceit, belligerence and obstinacy rather than engagement and progress. Oh, and whining on unrelated internet forums.

[opaque]

It's easier for them to have a standard response than it is to actually deal with people individually as well.
Easier to manage and record details if you're not fiddling around with things. For every 'missed' appointment there's a tick in a box somewhere that they don't want to have to deal with. Somewhere along the line in a freedom of information request there will be a figure of 'missed' appointments that someone could use for political gain, or in the case of the Daily Mail, 'scrounging benefit thieves working illegally instead of attending job seekers interviews' type stories!

Hopefully things will change for you!