Consumers fight back!

tpsonline.org.uk

I start with this web site address because it is the way that you can stop unwanted telephone calls from companies which are trying to sell you something you don’t want. It says it takes up to 28 days to activate, but if it cuts down on those nagging calls from foreign call centres asking you about you mobile phone. The process is very simple and takes a couple of minutes. Do it!

If only all my other grumps were as easy to foil! I suppose that I am being naïf and believing that it will work. I live in hope – which also goes for the people who are coming to view the house this Wednesday: well, hope on my side anyway! If they buy then I could be in Catalonia by Christmas. I shall gaze at the picture of the sea in Castelldefels again!

In spite of having had to visit the dentist today for the replacement of a chunk of tooth which cracked away from the molar just as the dentist was closing on Friday, I still feel optimistic. Perhaps it’s the drugs, though I am not sure that ‘euphoria’ was one of the side effects listed for blood pressure medicine!

Tomorrow is my ‘sign on’ day again. At least I have (at last) managed to get the doctor’s letter (which was written on the 5th of October) so God knows what it has been doing drifting about the in trays of the administration in the surgery; that grey never-never land in any organization. For me, when I was working in Cardiff Planning Department as the lowest of the low, just before I went to University, I had my own little grey area of administration. As a filing clerk all that I was supposed to do was check the numeric designation in the right hand corner of any official letter and then place the letter in the appropriate numeric file. This was a simple and foolproof system - as long as the people in the office actually used it. Of course, they didn’t. So when a letter arrived in my demesne and my eager eyes lighted on the right hand corner and searched in vain for a clue as to where I should put the bloody thing, I had to make an executive decision about the content of the letter and then place it in the appropriate file. Considering the fact that I had only just joined the Planning Department and knew nothing of what it was doing, having the communications system of the place in the control of the person least qualified to understand what was going on was not, to say the least, the most intelligent piece of placement in the history of the administration of Cardiff.

Not being totally stupid a cursory glance at the heading of the letter might sometimes give a gentle clue so, for example, a letter headed, ‘Car Parking in the CDA’ might, fairly safely, be placed in the car parking file. Others however were not so clear cut and I resorted to photocopying some letters and placing them in multiple files to cover, as it were, my options.

It soon dawned on me, however, that this approach was tripling or in some case quadrupling my work load. A new method was called for, so I instituted, a la De Vinci Code, les dossiers secretes, or the bottom drawer of my desk. So any difficult letter that arrived for me to file went straight into the bottom drawer and I waited for someone to ask if I could work out where a certain letter could be. I would wait for them to leave my office and then les dossiers secrete would be consulted and then the letter would be magically produced. As far as I know that bottom exists still, probably integrated into the new system in a completely new planning department! Probably the whole desk had to be carried to its new venue complete and intact.

I wonder if I will be subjected to the unreconstructed worker again in the Job Centre. I will be fascinated to see if he has developed over the last two weeks. Perhaps he might say hello this time, you never know, he might have had some in service training since the last time. Of such small moments is my life made up now!