Help!

I get the train to work.

I like it. Generally it runs on time, I get a free newspaper and I can people watch (one of my favourite things.)

It also lets me wind down after a day in the office and I can think about dinner/read a book/switch off without causing a road accident.

This week it’s also let me do a little bit of thinking about employment, employers and some of the practical help I’ve needed to keep me in a job.

My working life has seen me in the private then the public and now the third sector – quite a variety, but the one common thread is that it has never been easy being at work and having MS.

Surprisingly however, some of the hardest battles I’ve had weren’t with my employers – who have generally been quite understanding and supportive, if a little bewildered by the vagaries of the condition – but with the people ostensibly put there to help.

Access to Work was a particular struggle. Great idea, rubbish execution.

Not the lovely man who came to sort me out with fancy office equipment and an impressive James Bond-esque villain’s chair. (Although still slightly disappointed by the lack of ejector seat, take note office suppliers.)

But the woman on the end of the phone being incredibly difficult about the process by which to claim transport to the office. The woman who quite clearly didn’t believe I was unwell even though I had a letter from my medical team, copies of my scans and occupational health reports. Plus I had wobbly tear voice on the phone so it must have been true.

Perhaps I just got a jaded fed-up worker, perhaps she’d seen a few scams (although the whole flippin thing is so complicated and exhausting I almost, almost, take my hat off to anyone who can scam the benefits system) perhaps I was unlucky enough to just speak to a bit of a jobsworth.

Perhaps she was secretly just trying to save me from the taxi drivers. This may have been it as the taxi/passenger conversations during the time I needed to use cabs were quite eye-opening.*

Or perhaps I should stop excusing her.

Perhaps people who deal with claimants with chronic variable illnesses could do with a bit more training and understanding about chronic variable illnesses.

That would seem to make sense.

:: Help! By The Beatles

*They ranged from the mundane – weather, potholes – to the wholly unexpected; marital guilt (theirs), how to fiddle taxi claim receipts and the fertility issues of two separate cabbies. I unwittingly became a trapped confidante in some sort of mobile secular confessional.