Monday, October 31, 2011

Highgate Jobcentre Plus will go for anything!

If we had any doubt that Highgate Jobcentre Plus is gunning to terminate our benefits, we need look no further than this afternoon. Declan's new IT course, which takes place on Mondays and Thursdays, was clashing with our 'sign on' at the Jobcentre this coming Thursday - we sign for Jobseeker's Allowance every second Thursday. It should have been pretty straightforward to have our sign times changed from 12.10pm to 4.00pm. But nothing is ever straightforward with the Jobcentre.

Senior Operations Manager Tia Ahmed doesn't change my time, but in changing Declan's from 12.10pm to 4.00pm, insisted on writing that his original appointment had been scheduled for 9.15am, meaning now I don't know whether I am supposed to turn up this Thursday at 9.15am or 12.10pm. Declan even went so far as to tear Ahmed's note up, but she still refused to rectify the error and told Declan to take the torn up paper with him. So tomorrow Declan will dispatch his first tier complaint to the manager of the Jobcentre, just in case I run into any problems when I turn up to sign at 12.10pm, as scheduled.

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It never rains but it pours! When Declan got back to the flat on his own this evening, he opened the bathroom door and it came off its hinges! It was awkward for him because within two weeks of the dispatch last August of his application to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) regarding the interception of our communications and directed surveillance, our live-in landlady, human rights activist Belinda McKenzie, served us with backdated notice to vacate our flat by the end of January.

Anyway, he says it was nothing on discovering in September 2010 that the four TV blow-outs we had had within the first ten months of our tenancy were due to make-shift and damaged wiring on the roof of the house, which although live could end up lying in pools of water in heavy rain.





Belinda's builder, a Polish guy who has been working on an underground extension in the garden for months now, came up and took the bathroom door away. Great!