I phoned the Inland Revenue Tax Credits helpline on Susan’s behalf yesterday afternoon. Following that conversation and examining the documentation Susan’s retained there appear to be two problems:

• In the middle of 2005, Susan received a letter saying thank you for completing your 2003-4 Tax Credits piece. I now intend to query it: please provide evidence that you are still disabled.

Susan appears to have responded but not in the required way: there’s a further letter saying you haven’t provided the evidence I asked for. I am therefore removing the severe disability element of your tax credits.

Of course, since Susan had already received this money, the Inland Revenue wants it back. Similarly, they want back the severe disability element of her 2004-5 tax credits. They’ve just sent her ‘notices to pay’ back these sums, totalling over £1400. (I imagine they’ll also want back the severe disability element of the tax credits she’s received in 2005-6.)

• Tax credits are state support for people on low earned income or with other needs. The Inland Revenue carried on paying Susan tax credits after Morrisons dismissed her. The Inland Revenue will want that back. It’s unclear whether they’ve paid her the severe disability element but from the very low amount of the 2005-6 ‘award’, I think not.

So I’ve written the bones of a letter on Sue’s behalf which

• makes it plain that we have no quarrel with the amount of tax credit the IR say she’s received in 2003-4 and 2004-5 – it’s all there on her wage slips (when tax credit was paid via her employer) or in her bank book (when paid direct by Inland Revenue)
• appeals the decision to take away the severe disability element in these two years. After all, her condition is congenital and irreversible: it won’t get better. In fact, in 2004, the Department for Work and Pensions wrote to Susan, saying ‘we accept you have disabilities and will continue to do so until at least 2009’.
• asks for a blow-by-blow account of how and when the overpayments occurred because the amounts of overpayment appear to vary from document to document
• points out that because of her disability Sue doesn’t know what to do with official letters and so asks for leniency and tolerance in her case. (She has until 27 February 2006 to appeal the amount of her 2005-6 tax credits award but I don’t know if she can still appeal about the earlier years.)
• asks that they hold off attempts to recover tax credits paid to her after Morrisons dismissed her because it’s quite likely that once the Tribunal process has finished, she’ll be reinstated and paid for the time she hasn’t been working
• asks that if she hasn’t been paid the severe disability element in 2005-6, that she should be.

I wanted to write it while the conversation with the helpline worker was still fresh in my memory and so got to sleep around 3 am. So after the grievance hearing I went to bed and slept until the early evening.

I’ve emailed the draft to dad and Sue’s mencap worker so they can add tact and take into account whatever the Inland Revenue say in the ‘how to appeal’ piece they’re sending to Susan.

Meanwhile a huge Thank you! to everyone who’s sent encouraging words and thoughts, via LiveJournal or otherwise. It’s meant a hell of a lot to me and my folks.

http://disturbingthecomfortable.blogspot.com/2006/02/vonnegut-on-horror-and-glory-of.html

I thought you might like to see the world’s first colour ultrasound scans.

Just now I’m crying my eyes out at footage of cute babies in a Kenya elephant orphanage: in particular one poor little bugger who was rescued after its mother died and the rest of its herd rejected it. This rejection and the baby’s screams as it woke from anaesthesia and ran from the well-meaning strangers around it were utterly heart-rending.

Last night mum was cooking tea when she started feeling nauseous: she sat on the sofa with a ‘puke bowl’, too nauseous to even drink water. We made various efforts to comfort her and I continued cooking (because mum was concerned that dad and Sue should eat). This was the first time I’ve even come close to cooking meat in over two decades but my only concern was that I cook it properly: the animal-rights issues didn’t even surface in my mind.

Mum eventually recovered enough to eat some toast so she could inject her insulin, then went to bed.

Around 3 am, I heard her waking dad up because she was feeling cramps in her legs and couldn’t move. He massaged her and eventually they went back to sleep.

This morning Susan received a letter from the Employment Tribunal. By now mum had recovered enough to start washing clothes. I saw her tremble and asked what was happening. She cried a bit and said that she ached all over* and suddenly no longer had strength, then made a visible effort to get going again. (I think she wanted to be seen to function normally so I made her some coffee and left her to carry on filing Susan’s guddle of papers.)

Susan and I scanned the Employment Tribunal letter on dad’s PC: Sue now knows how to make a ‘photocopy’ and I assembled the files into a PDF to email to her MENCAP advisor.

Mum and Sue are now shopping in town and I’m trying to decide what to do in relation to all of this. I’ve said to both mum and dad (separately, while the other was out of earshot) that I’m considering giving up my India trip. Dad told me that I must ‘live my own life’. Mum said that me not doing what I wanted so would make her feel even worse. This makes me feel even more apprehensive about going away!

*a combination of arthritis and her recent-ish car crash

The main issue back here has been my sister’s unfair dismissal by Morrisons on 24th September 2005. Apparently on that day she was cleaning the sweetie area when she was asked to come to the store office ‘for a chat’. In the office, a local HR person asked her to sign a folded-to-A5 blank piece of A4 paper*. She was then escorted to the staff locker area, instructed to clean out her locker, hand over her staff ID and leave the store.

The next day she phoned in sick (and there’s no way our mum would let her get away with feigning sickness) but was told that she was ‘never to set foot in Morrisons again’. Mum intervened in that call (or was later phoned by the store management) to say that Susan had been sacked for pilfering. The story has been changed since then: they now seem to be saying:

• Susan was ‘allowed to resign’ to save her the ignominy of being sacked.
• She was seen to pilfer a sweetie by a security guard.
• She spat out the sweetie onto a table.

Susan maintains she took nothing (and she is well aware that pilfering is an offence liable to summary dismissal for ‘gross misconduct’), spat nothing and in no way resigned. She knows that without a job, she has no income** and if she was being sacked, even summararily, she should have first been told why at the time and been allowed representation at any proceeding.

After months of non-communication from Morrisons, Susan was invited to a ‘grievance hearing’ on Tuesday at 10am. She and her MENCAP advisor arrived at 9.55 and were told that the person who was to run the hearing wasn’t available. Instead a Morrisons store manager from Aberdare (and so not part of the aggrieved or aggavator’s line-management, as you would expect) who had had 90 minutes to become acquainted with the case, tried to run things. After Susan and her MENCAP advisor had been kept on ice for 90 minutes, he asked them to reconvene next Tuesday since ‘key people’ weren’t currently available.

*However, during the hearing, the paper was shown. Someone else had written a resignation letter above Susan’s signature. (The Morrisons people agreed that the actual letter was in someone else’s handwriting.) When the MENCAP advisor asked for a photocopy, she was told that photocopying facilities weren’t currently available. I’ve just made sure that Dad’s scanner will work with my laptop and so will be able to block that loophole on Tuesday.

**Not sure whether or not Susan gets income support, jobseekers’ allowance or any other benefit. The local dole office (can’t recall what they now call themselves or which government department runs them) has sent Susan a stock reply saying her entitlements are (at the very least) reduced because she ‘voluntarily’ left her job ‘to pursue other career opportunities’ (a phrase which is byond Susan’s vocabulary!). To add insult to injury, she’s just received a tax form stating that she owes the Inland revenue over £1400 in overpaid tax credits.

Right now I’m trying to sort and file all her documentation…

I wanted all the ‘puters in the house on a network so that I could remotely maintain them using Timbuktu, without the delay horrors of dial-up. I didn’t want an extra wire going into the iBook – that would just worry mum and I hoped that slotting in an Airport card (and hence making no visible change to the iBook’s external appearance) would do the trick. I didn’t like the implementation of WEP in OS9: it only allows for a ‘WEP password’ rather than the various flavours of WEP my router offers and in the end I only got network connectivity by switching off WEP! Also AIrport cards are now getting past affordability. Time to try OS X!

I have installers for OSX 10·2 and 10·4. 10·4 won’t work on this iBook. 10·2 failed to install and properly update: I had installers for 10·2·0 which worked fine. Software update to 10·2·8 also appeared to work. However the second round of software updating to give the bells and whistle fell over, leaving the machine unbootable. This happened 3 times (each time after deep-erasing the hard disk) so I suspect that the wee hard disk (6GB) is just getting too full of temprary files and falling over. I do have a spare 30GB HD but I don’t want to take on this surgery: I’d only get the blame if anything went wrong. Also, the implementation of WEP in 10·2·8 (sans bells and whistles) is no better than that of OS9.

So back to OS9 and wired connectivity: the router is next to my dad’s PC, on the right of mum’s desk. I strung an ethernet cable from the router, under the desk and into the port on the left-back corner of the iBook. So the cable was mostly hidden and the bit that was visible wasn’t obtrusive.

For a while (i.e long enough to install OS 9.1 and other applications [including downloading updates] and then restore mum’s data), the ethernet port on Mum’s iBook worked. It’s now ceased working. Airport cards are getting far too expensive. I am able to take control of it via Timbuktu if I get mum to establish a dial-up internet connection but that’s painfully slow. (However it has the advantage of me not needing to leave a hole in the router’s NAT firewall).

I’m about to set up Timbuktu on my dad’s XP box… wish me luck, please

I don’t know whether it’s worth doing similar for my sister’s windows 98 PC, not least because it isn’t on the home network yet. I’d need to buy another piece of wireless kit and get that to link into the network I’ve set up or persuade my folks to run an ethernet cable from the router to the PC. The former is more expensive (and I don’t really have money to splash around on kit) but would be a fun wee task.

I spent monday morning cleaning even more, moving the cooker back into place and tidying. I also called my ISP, my phone provider, BT and my utilities provider to arrange the final bills. I have to read the meters on the morning I depart – please don’t let me forget!

I then spent 4 hours teaching my fairtrade colleagues to maintain our website. It’s not hard (after all, I can do it!) but they were until then completely unfamiliar with the concepts behind the web. They had to understand enough of these, then learn to add entries to the directories and then create new pages for each meeting’s minutes, then set up the links between them and a listing page. I’m sure they’ll do fine – they all have at least degrees and one has a doctorate. Also, they’re some of the nicest people it’s ever been my pleasure to work with and in my relatively short life, I’ve been lucky enough to meet a lot of fine folk.

I then spent the evening making this place really tidy. The front room, especially, looks father soul-less and unlived-in: there’s just a table, two chairs and a sofa. The only signs that I lived here are the two racks of sockets along the wall, the neat clipping of cables to the skirting-board and my ADSL router winking on the table. That will disppear with me.

This morning I applied edging strip to a piece of furniture for the first time ever. If you look closely, you’ll see it’s not a professional job but it looks good from quite close and makes the piece look much better. I did this while waiting for a rental agent to arrive: apparently her PC had gone down and she therefore didn’t know she had an appointment for 10am, so had booked another one. She eventually arrived about 11, took some notes, told me what to do next (prepare an inventory) that was it. It’s already on their website.

Next thing: sign some papers amalgamating my two pension schemes into one, then back to the fairtrade leaderine’s place to sort a few inconsistencies in the sidebars and check that the changeover of signatories form was correctly completed, then sort a few things on the leaderine’s mac. The bank told me that while I had completed the form OK, I needed the photocopy of the new Vice-chair’s passport to be notarised.

‘How do I do that?’
‘Get someone in a position of authority to write on the copy that it is a true copy, sign their name, give their job description and their phone number.’
‘Who is in a position of authority?’
‘Teacher, local councillor, JP, social worker,…’
‘Her husband is a social worker. Can he do it?’
‘Yes’

Just my luck that both our Vice-chair and her husband weren’t in this evening.

I was then picked up by our new treasurer so I could transfer the files for our bank account to his PC, show him how I ran the accounts, get his PC to pick up email to
treasurer@fairtrade-standrews.org.uk and pass to him the task of getting the change of signatories form completed.

So that’s it: my duties with the St Andrews Fairtrade Town Campaign are over, possibly forever. I’m quite sad: we achieved a lot, I spent some very enjoyable times with some very good people. I just hope I can find another nice in which I can use my skills to make things better for someone somewhere.

Tomorrow I have to buy travel insurance, chase up my tickets, replace the seal behind the kitchen sink, get some vaccinations and get some curtains sewn nicely. Toodle pip till then

Back at the parental ranch after an uneventuful journey (and what was for me an emotional ‘au revoir’ to the usual suspects.

After unpacking, the first thing to do was to set up my router on dad’s broadband account and get the computers all online.

• I put the router in the place of dad’s DSL modem, backed up its settings to my Pismo and then changed the settings to use dad’s account. Bingo: Pismo was online!
• Strung an ethernet cable from the router to dad’s PC and pulled out the DSL modem. Started it up and Bingo number 2: the PC was online.
• Strung another ethernet cable from the router to mum’s iBook. Er, no joy: the router claimed there was no physical connection between it and the iBook. Used the same cable to connect my Pismo to the router, disabled wireless on the Pismo. Pismo behaved fine, so the cable and router are OK.
• Put the Pismo’s airport card in mum’s iBook. Bingo number 3: iBook is online.
• Tried upgrading the iBook to OS 9.1 (it was at 9.0.2) to see if that made a difference: NO
• installed Timbuktu on the iBook to be able to control it remotely. Works by IP but I’m not yet sure I’ll be able to reach through the router’s NAT to get at it.
• put my airport card back in my Pismo so Timbuktu’s no longer an option anyway!