Prinz-Albrecht-Straße

HEALTH WARNING: This was going to be a brief and hopefully amusing report on my appointment at the job centre first thing this morning. It turned into something more like a scream. Please feel free to ignore it and move on.

This morning I had to report to Gestapo headquarters for an appointment with my "Work Activity Advisor". I grabbed this photograph from the car as I was leaving - sorry about the truly awful composition but I was in a lot of pain and I didn't want the guards to spot me with a camera.

The last time I was inside one of these places was 25 years ago, looking at the job adverts for something (anything) to tide me over for a few weeks while between careers. It was what you might expect; an area with notice boards bearing a few cards with jobs on (shelf stacking, "have you considered the prison service", Join the Army and get shot at) and a few desks at the back with people working at them. Frankly a big improvement on the one I briefly used in Edinburgh 31 years ago; a dirty, cigarette stained barn full of people with body language ranging from grim defeat to stunned disbelief, shuffling forward in several queues to perform the weekly ritual of presenting themselves at the counter and "signing on" ie stating they were available for work. It was at that time the most depressing, soul destroying place I'd ever seen, I saw a lot, lot worse later when I was homeless (working a night job plus full time trying to work on my Phd during the day and still unable to afford a place to live....but that's another story or rather many stories). Anyway those earlier, brief experiences of "the Brew" were in Thatchers Britain, surely this is the bright shiny, semi privatised wonder of Cameron's Britain, The Big Society, furthermore I had been driven here by threats of having my income removed in order for them to HELP me, I assumed I would enter to a warm welcome from caring, friendly staff who would lead me to a chaise longue, ply me with coffee and jammy dodgers, perhaps even a fine single malt while they polished my crutches and discussed the many, many jobs there were available for someone who can't walk more than 20 yards, and that on crutches and in pain, has limited use of hands and arms, cannot sit up without pain and increased shaking, all of which increases in intensity the longer he remains upright, and whose thinking processes are fogged and blurred by drugs and neurological disease...oh yes and who is fairly deaf and blind in one eye...I think that more or less covers it...oh no I forgot the improperly healed compound fractures and the psoriasis....and the depression of course...and the trivial fact that my 3 (count 'em, 3!) spinal diseases are not only incurable but progressive and little things like sitting up, moving etc accelerates the speed of degeneration. Surprisingly it wasn't like that at all. To start with as I entered I found myself in an open area where the jobs used to be and under the aggressively impassive scrutiny of 3 uniformed security guards standing ramrod straight at regular spacing across the 20 or 25 feet wide room. Not just ramrod straight but in the military "at ease" position. "Ay! Ay!" I thought, appraising their ages and haircuts, "nice to see our troops getting good jobs after they leave the forces." Behind this defensive line 2 faces peered suspiciously from behind desks. I began my Richard III crutch-walk across the floor and 5 pairs of eyes watched every step, eye brows raised in the standard issue "that's your impression of a disabled walk is it, ho ho laddie! I didn't just come up the Clyde in an umbrella!" facial expression. As the guards were standing in the middle of the floor rather than behind any kind of reception desk I was unsure who to report to so lurched my way in the direction of the office workers at the back. Three sets of shoulders closed ranks a hand was raised, arm extended, hand at right angles palm toward me in the unmistakable STOP gesture of any good road block. I identified myself, there was a muttered consultation, a list was inspected and I was directed to seat myself and await instructions - a small, uncomfortable sofa was indicated. The same cynical, appraising expression was used by all faces as my performance at sitting down and stowing crutches was marked out of 10. After a short wait a guard approached and escorted me to a lift where he presented me with a hand written pass and told me to give it to the guards upstairs. I did and after further inspections was led to the interview area, an open plan office containing half a dozen people at desks, closely cramped together in a smallish room.

I had intended to simply answer the questions posed, resist water boarding as far as possible and leave as quickly and with as much dignity as possible. It didn't quite work out like that. One of the effects of my opiates (and to some extent my depression) is a state of detachment, its hard to describe but its like watching someone else experiencing things rather than experiencing them directly, one finds oneself losing contact with emotions etc. - not that you don't have them it's just that its like being aware of those feelings in someone else's body. Today I watched a very angry, outraged and desperate person lose their self control and tell an unfortunate civil servant (who was only following orders) exactly what he thought of the manner in which ATOS had made his life a nightmare of stress and anxiety for months before feeding the name of a medical condition (only one) into a computer program, cancelling their planned physical assessment and classifying him as fit to work. He expressed in emotive language how his illness had taken almost his entire feelings of purpose and worth as it stripped him of his roles as colleague, bread winner, equal partner in his marriage, value as a father, imprisoned him in a body that could no longer do most of the things that made life wonderful - no more riding a horse across the downs or round the ramparts of the nearby hill forts, no more walking through woods and over moors - and after 16 years of this a computer and a junior clerk had consulted a check list and branded him as a liar, a cheat and a fraudster, a dirty worthless scrounger who had dragged his family through poverty and emotional hell all because he had overnight become too lazy to work for a living the way he had his whole sodding life. I did not mean to say these things, I did not choose to say these things, I just sat there and watched someone with my face and voice fall apart in public. After this there were some questions, I answered them. In an open plan office in front of half a dozen all too obviously listening strangers I described the intimate details of my medical history. I was advised of what I had to do to comply with my new situation and the disastrous consequences of failing to do so. I made a short statement of what I thought of the morality of this aggressive campaign against the disabled and I left.

The atmosphere in that building was a palpable one, it was fear. Every movement I made was closely watched by multiple security guards and every single member of staff. It was as if what they saw coming through their door wasn't a scruffy, long haired shambling figure who can barely take basic care of himself but a combination criminal and explosive device that could detonate at any moment. These places have always been depressing places where staff had to administer often brutal social policies, spaces in which extremes of human emotion were regularly played out and where staff could easily become cynical and disillusioned just as the unemployed could easily become desperate and resentful but when did we descend to this level of us and them? Frightened staff surrounded by guards, vulnerable citizens treated as the despised semi criminal underclass of society. This can't be how we carry on....can it?