It’s all about that four letter word…. H…E…L….P… HELP!
When I grew up under Thatcher in the mid to late 1980s everything was about customer service. How do you make a better experience for your customer without them even asking. That approach even seeped into the charitable and public sector too, for a little while.
Ergonomically designed DHSS waiting rooms, calls answered by human beings, on Freephone numbers, if you didn’t get what you needed at the Housing Office all you had to do was insist on seeing a manager and like a magic wand all things were sorted.
Today though, everything is about how people can avoid helping. A simple email request for assistance leads to 100s of emails to-ing and fro-ing to get the most basic things done and even that invariably will not lead to a solution but to simply being ignored.
Take my doctors, they use an e-consult service, which on the surface is a good idea, however the problems it generates are tenfold. You spend ages inserting information, filling in fields which inevitably don’t precisely cover what you are looking for, so you fill in information in the “any other information” box, laying out clearly what’s needed.
But the system automatically sends you off for tests and you don’t actually see your doctor for another two weeks. By then you have the expectation that the doctor will have all the information you supplied in all of those boxes in front of them, but they don’t, they just have the results. So you come away realising that you haven’t covered many things you wanted to discuss, the moles that concerned you, which is why they gave you the blood tests to check for cancer, but they still haven’t told you if those moles could be a problem? Because you were anticipating all your questions submitted on the form would be addressed in the consult, you forget they are missed until you get back to your accommodation.
So you drop them an email follow up, but they respond by telling you, you have to fill in the same form that the doctor ignored in the first place and we’re off on the merry-go-round again.
If people want to help they do. They don’t find reasons not to. But culturally Britain has now all become “Computer Says No” drones. Not having a thread of decency in society is a real problem when you’re poor and experiencing homelessness.
Anything that isn’t easy takes away what little strength you have. So if you reach out and say, “can you help me with this?” and rather, ironically, as most people experiencing homelessness would do, say “of course” and do so, what you’ll get back from those people paid to help, is a long nonsensical list of why they can’t.
You’ll then evidence why what they’ve said is all nonsense, taking hours of your time which would be far better spent on other things, all of which they’ll ignore and come back to you with yet more nonsensical responses that doesn’t relate to anything you’ve written, so you’ll then get a third party to agree with your interpretation of things, just to put your mind at ease that you are not going entirely mad, and when that third party concurs, it’s at that point the charity, local authority or DWP will simply ignore your correspondence.
I mean, what are you going to do?
In the 21st century or at least since 2010, there are no consequences whatsoever for people failing to do their jobs only for taking responsibility for something. So we have a culture of fear, of blaming anyone but me and if I do nothing, I can’t be blamed for the ‘something’ I’ve not done.
It’s insane, but here we are.
And it’s always the utterly smallest things, that take seconds that have the biggest impacts, that people won’t assist with.
BT has free Wi-Fi absolutely everywhere, if you have their code you would never not get online (especially here in London), but does BT offer it to charities to give to those experiencing homelessness? No. Why? Who knows. Maybe because it would be helpful.
Google could set up systems specifically for those who are homeless and who need backups of everything as it’s exceedingly likely their devices will be broken or stolen, but that isn’t going to earn anyone money, simply make life better for members of society and who wants that?
Even something as miniscule as retweeting something someone experiencing homelessness has posted, could literally be a life-saving action, it takes less than a second, but nope, not even here do you get much assistance.
Help. It used to be our default to assist, now it’s our default to walk away.
Until those that work in the welfare institutions, start being human (for that is what helping each other is, a benefit to society as a whole) the homeless death counts will continue to rise and we as a society will care less and less.
So if you are ever in a position to help, grab it, do it, and you’ll possibly save someone’s life, and they may, in return, help you!
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