Bull .

Edit - Just seen Mintballs reply. I think she covers it!

I'm glad people are finally waking up to the fact that they have been lied to from the start. I also commend you Standee for saying what you see, it would have been so easy for you as a Tory to stick your hands over your ears chanting la, la la and denying there was anything wrong and telling us so in the Sin Bin. I knew it was all a pack of lies nearly 4 years ago when Maria Miller preached how they were going to weadle out DLA fraudsters in the PIP shuffle then let it slip it was really to get 20% off DLA, any 20% of people, fraud or genuine even when charities and organisations were professionally telling them how not to do it but they charged through it anyway without listening to the very people and organisations it would affect.

The benefits system is in total disarray. Mrs D has just managed to get them to sort out Ms D's from March 2012. If we hadn' t support her how could she have lived these last 2 years or so? As a disabled person who could not possibly understand the system how could she have even claimed? Is this what looking after the "most vulnerable" looks like?

My local jobcentre have, in their infinite wisdom, sent me back to college Tues and Wed, 10am until 4pm, for the next month. (I'm 4icon_cool.gif
Benefit will be sanctioned (withdrawn) if I fail to attend.
On Wednesday I had to build a free standing tower using only four sheets of A4 paper, sellotape, and a stapler.



I am still in the process of shaking my head!

Did you manage it?

I retired to Whalebone on Wincolmlee to think about it during my hour dinner break.



I you not!

Ah my monday after work haunt, have they still got mould on the walls?

Indeed, part of the character. The dust amongst the old beer bottles lining the top shelf is an absolute art-form.


Some nice hand pulled Copper Dragon went down well though.
Just as well because the maths test I had to sit on the afternoon was equally as challenging.

Q. If you had ten apples and gave away three how many would you have left?

I am buying a litre bottle of Coke, binning, half of it and filling it up with 35cl of Smirnoff to get through next weeks installment.

Again, I you not!

Do you get an NUS card ?

Did the tutor have special pens and was her name Barbara?

Go on – I'll bite: what's the course and what's the supposed aim?

I swear they were trying to flog us them at a discounted £9 a throw.

Steve, ex-army, by the book to the point of pedantry.
I left him under no illuions after the first half hour of the first class!

He was trying to rally the troops (a mixture of young and old, several with obvious substance abuse problems) that the course was nothing to do with the DSS and we were all going to have a bit of fun and a jolly.
I cut his legs off early doors by pointedly informing him that is was opaquely apparent that neither myself or fellow students (

) wanted to be there and the only reason for our attendance was that our JSA would be automatically sanctioned (basically stopped and left with fook all to live on) if we refused to turn up.

You aren't biting Minty, I'm telling you how it is.
Funny thing was I had to go and sign on yesterday so saw my jobcentre advisor.

Conversation -:

Jobcentre advisor - ''How are you finding the course Graeme?''

Me - Eyes open as wide as I can, just about to tell her.

Jobcentre advisor - Head shaking, ''We know we've already been told.........Can you sign here and I'll see you next week Graeme.''

I wasn't suggesting that you were inventing it – just asking what they call such a course and what on Earth they imagine making a tower out of paper is supposed to achieve, because my own imagination hasn't come up with any ideas.

It achieves a full time job for the course tutor and as its probably a contracted-out service it provides some nice government funding to a privately owned organisation who can then proudly boast that they are re-training lots of idle layabouts who were previously scrounging off the taxpayer, not that they themselves are scrounging off the taxpayer, oh no.

Don't think it has a particular name, just one of the compulsory Work Programme courses.
I honestly think it's basically designed just to try and sicken people off so that they won't attend so they can sanction and possibly knock them off the monthly unemployment figures.
The tower out of paper exercise was some bollox about 'team-work' because there was actually three of us in our group with four sheets of A4 paper, sellotape and a stapler.



Time-management and motivation I believe is on next weeks agenda.



As one of the older gentlemen (late 50's) succinctly expressed to the tutor, verbatim........

''What the fook has this got to do with me finding a job? I could be out looking for some fooking work right now.''

Tutor replies - ''I know'' .

I actually asked him where the money was coming from for this bollox.
''All through Hull College'' was his reply.
So yes, all government funded.

Even in work you get bs courses, I did an NVQ in leadership and management, all I did was gather evidence of all the work I do at work, had someone watch me for an hour and the same person interviewed my boss and an underling for a perspective of people above and below me. I learned the sum total of fk all and I got a qualification for it.

As the money advice unit told Mrs D the other day - the benefits sysyem is in disarray because the private companies involved are useless. I assume your tutor works for one?

I got a Microsoft qualification (certificate signed by Bill gates and everything) in SQL Server 2005 integration and other bollax simply by attending a course for a week, letting them feed me for five days, not understanding anything that was going on around me, then finding all the answers to the exam at the end were on a CD tucked in the back of the course manual - copied off that during the online exam and got full marks & was the only one in the room to do so - a room full of local authority database programmers and geeks.

I didn't join in the debate at the end where one of the questions was revealed to have the wrong answer though, just slipped out the back door with my certificate and my 100% mark with the wrong answer.

Definitely sounds like Barbara to me. Did any of the substance abuse people want to be firemen?

You'll have to feed me a bit more?

and the money advice unit is................a private company more D-b's

The money advice unit is part of the County Council, not private.