How’s our technological world working for you today?

January 26, 2016January 26, 2016 ~ drjfernihough ~ Leave a comment

So, I can sit in my living room and as soon as I hit “publish” this article will go live, reaching…. ooh, tens of people I imagine. My blog will be global though, instantly, amazing. However, having spent an hour at a primary school e-Safety meeting tonight, I’m beginning to think that might be where my internet savvy skills end. The presenter spoke extremely knowledgeably about a previous, similar evening where a seven year old boy told him he had watched someone hang themselves, live, (absolutely no pun intended) online. He was worried he might now get in trouble. How do we live in a world where technology has enabled this to happen? Everyone my age has “Googled” the words ‘bum’ and ‘sex’ when they were younger, only our “Google” was the paper version of the Oxford English Dictionary. Kids now really can use Google and the number 1 hit from the magazine Cosmopolitan will certainly dispel 10 myths they never thought they knew about bum and sex. So how do you stop this? Well, knowing how the technology works in your house helps but having real offline conversations with your kids works better, unsurprisingly and internetmatters.org can help with both.

Phew, so now I can put the internet back in its place and get on with life then?

Well, no. I can’t. Let’s start with Facebook, that repository of truthiness. Yes, it can deliver a kitten shooting fireballs from its mouth upon request and it’s where a grumpy puppy can amass 54,896 followers. It’s also where I am reminded of my friend who blogs the most amazing, delicious vegan recipes interspersed with chilled out stories of her life. I encourage you to have a look at abitofthegoodstuff.com and applaud this use of the internet enormously. Facebook is also where I discovered today that a friend has had a really rough day. Unlike many others, I like even posts like this. They are real. They hopefully provide a genuine means to vent frustrations and connect with supporting friends, easily, when health issues prevent people from doing so offline. What was my friend’s particularly issue today? She was on the receiving end of a particularly vicious civil servant, defending her right to receive disability living allowance when her ignorance of aids that could help her was dismissed with one word: “Amazon”.

That’s my second gripe about the internet. Because it is online, or on Amazon, we can assume it is part of our social consciousness, automatically? Estimates of the size of the internet in 2013 suggest that there is more data online than there have been words spoken by the human race so far. This friend is recovering from cancer and chemotherapy and has been thrown head long into a world of other health issues that virtually all of us have never even heard of; and I hope we will never suffer from them. Yet this friend has effectively been told that she should, indeed must, live a significant part of her life online to be cognoscent of all potential support. Maybe the fireball shooting kitten or grumpy puppy would have cheered her up. Perhaps the vegan recipes, cooked by a helping friend with higher energy than she has, would replenish key nutrients. But SHOULD she know the precise nature of all possible aids simply because they are neatly described on one of the more than 14 trillion live web pages out there? Have we forgotten that we are people first and internet users second? For many parts of the world, particularly those without any support for disability issues, the internet doesn’t exist. Presuming that the internet is so pervasive in our lives filters our experiences to those of the developed world only. Ironically, this shrinks the global village inaccurately, to include only those areas lit by technology.

geovideo

Animated image of internet use by the hour courtesy of the Huffington Post

I recently had an interesting conversation which feels relevant here, about how the world is basically designed for the healthy. In fact the not so healthy world is also designed by the healthy. The example given to me was a hearing impaired old lady, living at home on her own who is offered a button on her phone that can turn the volume up for her. The reasoning is quite simple: it’s a well meaning “that’s what I would want, if I lost my hearing”. But an old lady living on her own at home is more likely to want the phone to be loud ALL the time. It’s her phone after all. How frequently are normal hearing people making calls on her phone? Why do these rare visitors deserve the phone in its default “healthy” setting? What her phone needs is a button that quietens it, for these rare occasions.

When I think about it, I’m not sure the internet is a place for the fit and well either, most of the time. I’ve used the internet on my phone to upload my CV repeatedly to jobsinlifesciences.com and been told that my CV.docx file is not acceptable, because it doesn’t have a .docx extension. The internet does not intrinsically do sarcasm. I have tried to kill OPPRTUNITY on LinkedIn and failed there as well. This app is a virus of the recruiting world and is busy spamming my connections online despite my many murderous attempts.

The internet will, however, allow my husband to check work emails on a Saturday; respond to the urgent meeting request by booking a trans-atlantic flight, hotel, hire car and train; book two babysitters and a school breakfast club to support the single parent left at home; cancel all UK based meetings for the week and reschedule a call with an Indian based colleague for the train journey on the way to the airport all within 36 hours of the email arriving. Should we be able to use the internet like this? There is some backlash to this, with companies like Basecamp providing their employees with a holiday catalogue to choose from rather than cold, hard cash as a bonus. They have realised that life is about real experiences not online ones and people work better when they have real experiences. That article may have been online, but unfortunately the message clearly hasn’t gone viral yet.

So I’ve browsed the internet furiously in the last few days to book a real life experience: SCUBA diving in the Red Sea this summer. I am going to slide down over 30 water slides with my kids, behave like a kid myself and eat nothing but donuts, pizza and hideously cheap white wine all week, all inclusive. However, right now, I am going to go to bed. I sincerely hope that after you read this, you put down the piece of technology on which you are reading it and have a real experience somewhere. Enjoy it, post photos, I can’t wait to see them.

It’s been a mixed* start to the New Year

January 19, 2016January 19, 2016 ~ drjfernihough ~ 1 Comment

If this is how we mean to go on, 2016, I’m going to have to have stern words. Actually, stern words didn’t seem to work with Connor on January 4^th as he climbed out of a school window to avoid the headmistress on the other side of the door, and ran out of the school gate and back home after hitting his friend “because he deserved it”. So how I think it will work on a whole year is anyone’s guess. The actual start to the New Year – the bit before and around the stroke of midnight – was excellent. A friend turned 50 on the night, so celebrations started in the self-built pub in the garage of a mutual friend. New Year’s Eve was our first chance to admire his Golden Cock. It was quite splendid with very drinkable home-brewed cider. We threatened to start a Tripadvisor page for it before going into town for more food, drinks and celebrations. As is traditional, my husband saw most of the festivity after midnight through resting eyelids, so we taxi-ed back home to discover the babysitter had washed up all of the dishes from the three course meal I cooked her and her husband while they made sure our kids were safe. There, that bit was all excellent and I really feel like I have been hibernating since then.

So, on Jan 4th, as my husband flew to the states for yet another week long business trip, as his plane rose into the air, I anticipated that only the traditional chaos would ensue. I expected the temperature of at least one kid to rise to the biological equivalent of 30,000 feet, matched only by the internet connection plummeting as far downwards. Surprisingly though, the first day of term was greeted by my youngest son climbing through a window and running at speed out of school.

The day (year?) didn’t start well for me to be honest, as I checked the alarm clock at 00:58 on January 4th and my watch long after that. My brain had decided to spend the entire night mulling over job interviews, tax issues and whether Connor would cause chaos on Wednesday at after school club, while I was in London being interviewed. Since the alarm went off at 4:15 in preparation for the trans-atlantic flight, I’d only had approximately 3 hours sleep before seeing my daughter off to school, loud and excited at 7:12. I then had breakfast with both sons and read lots AND LOTS of Facebook posts bemoaning how shit it is to go back to work after two weeks off. After 58 weeks “off” I can assure you all that NOT going back to work on January 4^th feels a hell of a lot worse. So, just to cheer myself up I decided to run 10K through the puddles along the canal, figuring that the day couldn’t get any worse anyway. It was an impossibly beautiful and impossibly difficult run, no personal bests were threatened that morning.

canal run

After a shower, my next exciting bit of news came in. I’m supposed to be meeting an Oxford professor on January 26^th, an appointment that has been made for two months now, given the busy diaries these guys keep. Only now the 26^th is cancelled and it will be a longer wait to see if I can do some work for him. Never mind, worse things happen at sea, they say, but presumably sailors didn’t spend much time in our local primary school.

I then had a quick lunch of leftovers: avocado and hot smoked salmon open sandwich, dressed with horseradish cream; it was Christmas leftovers after all. I declined stilton, panettone, Christmas cake, lemon tart, Gu puds, Lindt pralines, Christmas pudding and chocolates off the tree all calling me to indulge from various locations around the kitchen. This was an unnecessary choice to be honest, stress alone has lost me 10kg in weight over 2015. I am probably the only person to have gained no more than 100g over the whole festive period. After the healthy choice I pretty much moped and slept in the afternoon. I’m still calling it hibernating. I did call a bookkeeper with a desperate tone of voice (me not him) for help with my first corporate tax return due in on January 9^th. This would cost me £450 with a really professional company or £20 with the local bookkeeper. Given the lack of complexity in my accounts for 2014-2105 which are basically, money out: IKEA cupboards; money in: none, I’m going for the local guy.

So, then I thought I’d got through the first day of single parenting for 2016, unscathed. I checked email and realised that I was going to have to go to a supermarket as soon as possible as a cheerily annoying message reminded me that Newt had a school trip the next day: packed lunch required. That’s no biggy though; being given no notice for this sort of thing, positively business as usual. I went over to school early and confirmed the time of the meeting to discuss Connor’s appalling behaviour last term so that the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) can attend and then I relaxed to see how my sons had got on during their first day back at school. Newt had of course had an awesome day, and Connor had of course shut himself in the music room after an entire afternoon of kicking an apparently annoying kid in his class. After Connor’s teaching assistant had given me enough bare details, the headmistress greeted me and remarked that I looked “thin and tired”. It’s rare that I agree with her but on this occasion she was spot on. As we walked around the school grounds together, alternately following and then searching for Connor, she very politely used phrases like “managed move”. This is educational speak for “we’re out of ideas here, there’s a class of 29 other kids with whom we’re able to cope, but your kid is seriously pissing them off and so we want him out of our school”. Ironically, at that very moment as four adults were looking for him in various classrooms, he had left the school, and was back home watching Top Gear with his brother.

I ended the day scraping a flat dead rat out of the loft, which at least has dramatically reduced the number of flies in Connor’s room.

So where do we go from here? As I cast my eyes back over the holiday period there are some familiar emotions and unfamiliar scenarios. The festive season, for me, starts every year with the feeling that the mountain of wrapped presents under the tree is an indulgence we can ill afford particularly when there are no material goods we really need at all. One top from Long Tall Sally and I am a happy girl. In advance, I always imagine the Christmas break to be days and nights spent eating lots of quality food in exquisite company both of which I expect to appear by magic. In reality my time is spent eating mounds of chocolate in multiple forms and spending endless hours in the kitchen, realising I have forgotten some key ingredient and all the shops are shut. Our two fussy kids have survived on Jacobs Cream Crackers and refused to eat anything else for many meals. We have spent quality time with one set of grandparents, which was a perfect, idyllic time, with excited children surrounded by wrapping paper constantly wafting around their heads. As soon as we returned, and the New Year loomed, the weather worsened and overnight, social media, Good Food Magazine and TV programs are urging me to eat less than half the calories per day I have been used to for a fortnight, with all the support of a recipe card. We’ve also met with the school to discuss Connor’s management, which in practical terms has been a discussion of resource limitation and disciplinary policies. I’m prepared to bet Connor doesn’t care about either of these, nothing new there either.

In amongst all this familiarity, have been some unfamiliar experiences. We’ve had two visits with CAMHS, in the hope they could help Connor cope better at school. We discovered that all they can offer us is more parenting classes. Anyone who’s read my previous blogs will know how much I’d look forward to more of those. We’ve also, unusually, avoided the other grandparent. This has been a welcome change. No fourth kid to feed and wait on. We’ve been charged £130 by BT to mend the bodged job the previous engineer did. On a slightly more positive note, the New Year has dawned with job interviews: I’m now waiting on a company about a potential job offer. The role is amazing, two levels up from where I used to be, but the salary offered is the same as I used to earn. I am trying very hard to retain the self-dignity that says this isn’t what I’m worth. Unfortunately, I have VERY recently (less than an hour ago) been turned down for a freelance role, despite the fact that my soft skills are outstanding, as I don’t have the hard skills. This is evident from my CV, so it is more than a tad frustrating to go through the rigmarole of two interviews (and associated train fares) with four people for them to realise what they knew when I emailed my CV and application before Christmas.

So as Blue Monday rears its depressing head in January, I am reminded that so often it is our expectations that let us down. As a New Year starts we resolve to do better/more despite the evidence that nothing has really changed. Day has turned to night and day again, just as it did in 2015. My expectations that agencies work, professionally, be it recruitment, education, telecommunications or mental health are just that – my expectations. I am discovering, this a massively overoptimistic view. So, if anyone wants to employ a massively qualified optimist in 2016, who is capable of learning many, many hard skills you know where to find me.

*unprintably bad

10 steps to entrepreneurial success in Uganda!

December 17, 2015 ~ drjfernihough ~ 1 Comment

It sounds like one of those dreadful self-help books doesn’t it? As it turns out, I have helped myself a great deal with my 10 steps, but that’s not the point. This post is a brief story recounting my 10 steps with the Grow Movement as a volunteer consultant for Uganda600 and the point was to help Sulaina Nantale. Through this process we have become friends, but that’s the least of the story of how a modest scientist in the UK and a wonderful business woman in Kampala have, together, increased the turnover of her business five-fold using nothing more technical than Skype and Whatsapp.

Don’t worry, despite the Happy Christmas-ish theme and the appearance of this blog on Facebook, at no point will you be asked to say Amen or donate to charity to save anyone.

The Grow Movement tries to match clients to consultants as closely as possible in terms of industry, but I admit to feeling out of my depth when Sulaina’s hairdressing salon fell into my inbox. Reviewing my experience of the hairdressing business as “having hair” I was very tempted to back out. However, the Uganda600 project is backed by the London Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business to evaluate the impact of virtual consultancy on entrepreneur performance in Uganda. Backing out of such a high profile project and turning it into the Uganda599 project, didn’t feel like an option.

So, Sulaina and I took our first step together in July, assisted by the amazing country manager Emmanuel, who provided Skype on his laptop. Having volunteered for the Grow Movement before, I knew that the first sessions are all about relationship building, so I started with questions about family rather than finance. Sulaina informed me that she is the mother of four children, and her husband is dead. She then asked when we were going to start talking business. Sulaina clearly wasn’t interested in small talk and wanted results. Results for her meant increasing her income so that she could extend her salon. It was clear to me that she needed to improve her marketing, starting with building her brand. Once again I reviewed my experience of strategic marketing and brand management and came up with the answer “two MBA modules”. Admittedly, the brand management module was totally brilliant, for anyone who knows Professor Mike Beverland, but with a background as a PhD scientist, marketing is not my strong point.

Session 2 was upon us though, with the shiny new Project Management System up and running to report progress. So I discussed with Sulaina what she has that her customers absolutely love. Here’s where the cultural divide became obvious. One of the things that Sulaina’s customers love, apart from her wealth of experience and friendly nature is the fact that she has clean water. This isn’t always available from hairdressers who work out of their homes. It’s certainly a benefit, but I couldn’t quite see the business cards with “Clean Water” emblazoned across them as the key to Sulaina’s future success. Sulaina’s concerns were at the front of her mind at this early stage: client-friends who don’t pay and a salon that is too small to work in effectively. When she talked about the cost to extend her premises it was in the same breath as she mentioned school fees and it was clear that with around 5 paying customers a week who nearly all turn up at the weekend, an extension was out of the question for a while yet. However, as Uganda’s inflation rate has recently hit 16% I feared that Sulaina will be forever chasing her tail, saving up for an extension that becomes more costly almost daily.

Baby steps were made between sessions 3 and 6, which was not surprising. It’s hard to trust a stranger in a very different world from your own, who calls you up, once a week, pretending not only to understand your business concerns, but also telling you what to do to fix them. Sessions were frequently rescheduled and when they did happen, Sulaina’s conversation was dominated by ongoing, daily problems. The problem of working in your business rather than on your business is clearly universal. Printing her new business cards was also taking time, delaying the point when she could send these out to targeted groups such as local businesses from where clients could come during the week. Sulaina was also still selling handbags in a somewhat confused attempt to increase the income from women who came to her premises. It was so obvious from the pictures of stunning brides that she sent me on Whatsapp that her passion and exceptional skill is in the hairdressing. It can take many, many hours to create the incredible styles she does, this is not the UK high street world of hairdressing. I asked her to ditch the bags, to remove a source of income from her salon, and she did it. Make up now occupies the space as she vertically integrates her services to include beauty as well as hairdressing.

Eventually, seven steps in, I had the inevitable breakthrough and the words that made me smile and cry at the same time, “I want to set up a training school”. After session five I had logged a very different story onto the Project Management System to indicate progress to “Stage 2”. We had been discussing how to move clients from Saturday to mid-week appointments; nothing about training. My data was now likely to be “scattered” to say the least. Well, that’s for the business schools to worry about, I was smiling that Sulaina had let me in on her dreams. No going back. She took her newly printed business cards to local schools to advertise scholarships and in the process got more customers. They came to her small salon, with no bags in the way, and they paid.

For sessions 8-10 we consolidated the topics we had discussed, but always only once we had asked each other how our kids were doing. Family is very important in Uganda. Sulaina also told me about the impact I had had on Nantale Beauty Salon, “Your ideas are working for me. I put the ideas into practice and I get more customers”. It’s as simple as that. When I presented my work to the Grow Movement at the Ugandan Embassy in London, I was advised that this fluffy “I’m so grateful” crap won’t wash with my fellow business consultant audience though. We want numbers, and for Sulaina the numbers include around 25 paying customers per week now. Word of mouth will no doubt increase that soon.

The impact on my business is as significant. I have a CV that says I can increase the turnover of a business five-fold, over the phone. I have branding and marketing skills that are not reflected in my marketing assignment grade, but I know they work. I have huge admiration for Sulaina and an increased awareness of her culture and the harsh Ugandan environment in which she works.

Now I will let you in on a secret. The Grow Movement asks all its consultants to do 12 sessions, not the 10 steps I alluded to. So what did we do for the last two sessions, apart from swap the Christmas lists that our kids are forever extending? Well, I couldn’t let the business advice drop by the wayside completely. When Sulaina extends her salon, which is now just a matter of time, I advised her to have a massive re-launch party, at which she should start a loyalty card scheme. Sulaina’s ambition is to be known throughout Uganda for her hairdressing. She deserves this, and in my dreams, representatives from magazines such as Bride and Groom attend her party and write an article on her success and involvement with the Grow Movement. For now, she has all her children at home until after the national elections in February. The country is longing for a new leader after nearly 30 years of the existing regime. It is not just Sulaina who is restless for change for the better.

Finally, I have an invite to a salon re-launch party next year in Kampala, and what a celebration that will be.

If you’d like more information on the Grow Movement, check out their website www.growmovement.org and perhaps it will be your turn to spread some Christmas cheer across Uganda, Rwanda or Malawi next year.

No. 1 for school holiday childcare in the UK: professional camp, or the guy fishing in the canal?

August 11, 2015August 11, 2015 ~ drjfernihough ~ Leave a comment

So, my dear reader I must apologise for leaving such a long gap between blogs, but I have been a full time parent for a while, as in all day every day, as a result of my charming son being permanently excluded from a less than super holiday camp. Within 5 days of attending this year he had started bed wetting again and on the 7th glorious day in, he managed to do the following (quoting from the head office’s sales manager emails):

hit a child in the face and used a large stick as a weapon to threaten other children in his group.
received a warning for this however the team took the stick from him and he then ran away to the bottom of the field out of sight.
The camp manager followed him when he ran away to make sure he was safe however he got angrier and ran further and further away.
threw rocks, stones, mud, bottles and a brush at the camp manager, all of which could have caused injury had the staff member not managed to dodge these items.
refused to return to the school when asked and instead ran further away.
The camp manager had to physically stop him getting to the main road by putting himself between him and the road.
kicked, punched, scratched and pinched the camp manager.
continued to throw items at the camp manager and repeatedly kicked the school lockers as hard as he could.

This is the point at which the camp manager called me in the middle of a professional presentation to take him off site forever.

I propose a solution for any unlucky adult who finds themselves in a similar situation. After number 2 happens, and pardon the pun, before the shit hits the fan; you have a situation where an 8 year old child is a long way away from other children and is no longer holding a big stick. He is however, scared and very, very angry, having exercised both fight and flight as hormonal options. The huge rush of adrenaline in his system is going to take an hour to drop back to normal, which is how long it will take before you can have any kind of rational interaction with him. This would be the same for an adult. So just leave him alone. Back off. In fact, a better solution would be to manage a holiday camp for kids where there are not large sticks lying around that can be used as weapons and you wouldn’t even get as far as number 1.

However on the subject of camp management, I wonder if our experience would have been different had our son had a physical disability? Let’s imagine he is poorly sighted and only uses one eye, so has no stereoscopic vision – just like his brother in fact. Imagine he doesn’t cope as well as his brother, and he bumps into doorways, trips over steps and is injuring himself so often that the holiday camp have to exclude him permanently without 1:1 support, as they don’t feel equipped to look after him safely. He twists his ankle one too many times and with the ratios of staff to kids that they operate no-one is there to see the incident, but it’s the final straw. Would we have had four separate emails, containing 1070 words (2/3 the length of this blog post) outlining how rubbish Connor was at walking through doors, going down steps and staying upright? Would we have been asked to take our son home with a warning that unless he could stay out of harm’s way he wasn’t welcome back unless he had 1:1 support with him? Would they have declined multiple requests for a refund of the remaining days booked but not taken?

I imagine they might have been mortified at not being able to keep our child safe.

Bad behaviour is not an acceptable face of disability, so it is socially acceptable to shut it out. You’re allowed to have a behavioural policy at a childcare facility, but you’re not supposed to discriminate on the grounds of disability. That’s not working for me, when the disability is behavioural in manifestation. How about talking to the other kids about how Connor is different and how everyone might be able to help him, just as they might help a visually impaired kid? How about talking to us about how to help him; as their terms and conditions state should happen? How about embracing diversity and bringing it in to the camp with sensitivity, rather than pretending it doesn’t happen on their watch.

I realise this dream isn’t going to happen, this is the camp that can’t keep left over lunch pasta and yoghurt drinks off the floor.

Instead, the staff give kids constant attention with the often heard phrase, “don’t do that”; training them that attention is received for doing things they shouldn’t, right from the start of the day. It’s staffed by young teachers, probably newly qualified, underpaid and exhausted at the end of a long summer term. Hardly the motivated group you want looking after the most precious elements in your life. Connor says it’s easy to misbehave here because the staff members don’t watch the kids very well at all, so even if you tell a staff member that someone has hurt you, no-one does anything. They’re certainly not busy writing incident reports for twisted ankles or nose-bleeds both of which went unnoticed in my other two kids.

Which leaves me with my fiery youngest son at home now. More precisely, he is cycling with me as I run 10K along the canal tow path, splashing through puddles and playing eye spy with me. This is where we find the guy fishing.

Mr Rugby tots, http://www.rugbytots.co.uk/ as his sweatshirt embroidery says, asks Connor if he is already bored of the summer holidays as though this is a perfectly natural response to Connor marching up and talking to him out of the blue, disturbing his fishing peace and quiet. I explain the circumstances that have induced the look of panic on Connor’s face at having to tell him why he is not in a holiday camp right now.

He then turns to Connor and talks to him knowledgeably about how you have to make good choices when you’re in danger of getting in trouble. He treats him intelligently and warns him, that like his son 7 years ago who was also excluded from primary school, if you are always the kid causing trouble, you will get blamed for it even when it’s not your fault. “You don’t want to go through life like that, believe me”, he says. “You want to be a shepherd, not a sheep, doing the stupid things that some people, the “salads”, ask you to do. Connor is rapt and so when Mr Rugby Tots picks up his fishing rod, he does a deal with him. If Mr Rugby Tots can get a fish at the end of the line in under two minutes, Connor has to behave well for the day. The canal is apparently overrun with perch and in under two minutes there is a wriggling fish at the end of the line with a really spiky dorsal fin and orange ventral fins to delight my son with. Connor now has to be good for the day. As an extra bonus, Mr Rugby Tots then teaches Connor how to catch his own fish and he is ecstatic.

He jumps up and down and says that it is his birthday soon so he now wants a fishing rod as a present. Mr Rugby Tots pulls him up and says “if you want something, you have to work for it. If your mum is OK with it, and you behave for the whole of the summer holiday I will give you this fishing rod”. After Connor gives him a huge hug and I shake him by the hand, Connor spends the whole of the rest of the week checking daily that he is being well behaved enough to get a fishing rod.

This brief exchange has left Connor with a sense of achievement; a genuinely new skill, which we now have to try again on holiday in Pembrokeshire; a goal to work for with a reward that he really wants, rather than points for having fruit in his lunchbox and a new friend that he wants to show his lego to sometime.

There are some people on this planet who “get” kids. They should run holiday camps, and I’m glad to say that Skoolkidz is one such company http://www.skoolkidz.co.uk/ – Connor is loving it there this week. The manager is not 70 miles away, dick swinging over emails to distraught parents but instead is at the camp laughing with the kids, looking out for and stopping teasing before it becomes an issue.

As many parents struggle to balance family and work for 6 long weeks this summer, choose your childcare cover carefully. I’ll write to Ofsted for you for the first camp, the guy fishing by the canal may be your best start.

Farewell job centre

June 22, 2015June 22, 2015 ~ drjfernihough ~ Leave a comment

I recently received a charming letter from the lovely people at the department of works and pensions. You can tell its from them as soon as something that looks like brown toilet paper lands on your doorstep. It’s that or her majesty’s revenue and customs requesting money for tax and I haven’t made any money yet to pay tax on, so the job centre it is. In this lovely letter they pointed out that I could only claim job seekers allowance for 182 days and I had at that point in time already claimed for 160 days. Can’t fault their maths. Apparently many people do, though, as the remaining 2 sheets of A4 paper were dedicated to a lengthy explanation of how I could appeal this “decision”. In short though, my next appointment at the job centre would be my last.

I did briefly flirt with the online system that lets you know if there are other benefits you can claim for, however, I am fortunate enough to co-own my own home so that rules me out of any benefits. I am curious to know how owning bricks and mortar automatically provides you with an income though. Could I turn the house into a B&B for small residents? Can I start charging my children for breakfast extras like golden syrup on Shreddies? Where do they get their income from? Without questioning this infallible logic though, I turned up to my last appointment, and jauntily made my way to sign on. With the familiar smell of the carpet on the way up the stairs, and the unfamiliar smell of the man coming down, I finally reached my final destination on level 2 right on time. Left with the usual 10 minutes to kill, I noticed that of the 10 manned desks, only 4 had anyone signing on, whilst there was quite a queue forming. Reluctantly my last unnamed female dragged herself away from her essential chatting to get me to sign the little electronic pad.

That’s it, I’m done. No more £72.10 a week and high quality advice in return for the blood, sweat and tears of job seeking effort.

However, after I had scrawled my name, she handed me my next appointment, following the normal ritual of not checking whether this is any way convenient at all. I politely asked if she thought there was any point in me attending this next appointment given the delightful letter I had recently received? At this point UF let me know the delightful news that I could indeed keep attending, with the same commitment from me to find a job, the same process, and the same expectations of me from the job centre. In return I would get no money. However, I would continue to be considered as making Class 1 National Insurance (NI) contributions.

Anyone who does not understand Class 1 NI contributions is a) breathing and b) statistically higly likely to be working in a job centre. Just for kicks, I asked the UF what value the Class 1 NI contributions had? For example, if I were foolish enough to refuse their generous offer, how much would I have to “contribute” financially, myself to be eligible for the delightful process of applying for JSA again in the future? This is where UF reached for Google. I’m not even going to start. I’m sighing as I type.

Oh sod it, I am going to start. You’ve poured yourself a coffee before sitting down to read this, right? If you are employed to do a job, as in provide advice based on a knowledge set not widely held by “the crowd” then how does this situation ever arise? If you can be replaced by an electronic stylus and Google, then organisations should do exactly that. It would be cheaper surely? How am I sat on the unemployed side of the desk, being “helped” in my career advice by an an Amstrad computer from the 90’s and a search engine? The ergonomic mouse that looks like an iron and the bent keyboard that could summit mount Everest if it was only a couple of inches higher must have cost more than the rest of the IT hardware on the desk combined. Without the human at the desk you wouldn’t have the repetitive strain injury of clicking “I feel lucky” in Google and the costs of signing me on and answering my questions would have been reduced 100 fold at least. I could still use the electronic pen to write my name and for any questions I might have, I could read a hand written sign, on a sheet of poor quality, recycled paper just like those in the stairwell, that says “Google it”.

Rant over. After much clicking, confused facial expressions and at one point a frankly defeatist attitude to the whole process when she thought she couldn’t find the data I needed, the following information was gleaned:

If I apply for JSA again, I can’t apply before the first Sunday of next January 2016. At that point in time, my Class 1 NI contributions for the two tax years 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 will be reviewed. If I have earned, more than 50 times the minimum weekly earnings limit I can successfully claim JSA. “Whats the minimum weekly earnings limit?” I hear you cry. Well, I did ask, but obviously UF had to go back and google for that (&^*%&^O*^%!!!!!!!!) and could only find the numbers for 2012. I didn’t start. Apparently “it doesn’t go up much each year”, £107 was the magic answer.

Right now I’m having a tiny panic. Is this Class 1 NI contributions or income I have to have paid? There’s no way I can calculate Class 1 NI on any of my previous 24 years income, no-one can. If it’s income, over what time frame do I have to have earned £5,350? UF female stepped into my thoughts and informed me that if I earned “say” £6,000 (I suspect UF can’t multiply 107 x 5) between April 2013 and April 2015, I could claim JSA again next January if necessary.

Be still my beating heart……

Whilst maintaining my best smile, I politely declined her generous offer of my next appointment. I did point out that whilst the quality of the support I had received in my job hunting wasn’t quite worth the two hours driving and parking time, without the financial incentive as well, I really didn’t see that it was in my best interests to attend any more. UF couldn’t cancel my appointment though, she’s not qualified/trained/able to do that, I have to phone someone else and do that myself.

*sigh*

Compliments on my parenting skills, from two police officers

June 4, 2015 ~ drjfernihough ~ Leave a comment

Well, if I was going to meet our local police as a result of one of our children’s actions, I always thought it would be the smallest son with ADHD after he had set light to something like a residential block of accommodation, as a teenager. I did not anticipate the eldest daughter calling the police after an epic tantrum because she felt so unfairly treated by a clearly evil mother. There’s a difference between blogging and airing your dirty laundry in public, so I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say that the police officer who turned up in response to our daughter’s call, saw things a little differently to the tweenager. After a full and frank explanation of events, my parenting skills were commended and date of birth details taken for the whole household. I should have asked why dates of birth were so key. Perhaps they have a database of juvenile detention beds available and they have to book them a long time in advance. To be honest I think both the information and explanation were entirely redundant. If you’re going to receive an impromptu visit from the local police at your child’s request, I think it’s useful coincidentally, to have the components of this salad on your kitchen table.

Nothing says “no child abuse here” better, than a lime dressed bulgar wheat salad with chicken, peaches and feta cheese, garnished with toasted pecans.

Actually typing that out in full, there are many children that would consider this kind of food child abuse, but again, the police received a different impression. Granted, on the modern day obsession of food intolerances, both wheat and dairy, I am failing miserably as a parent. Equally, it’s not scoring highly with vegetarians and possibly celebrity chef inspired chicken welfare groups.

Forgive me my vegetarian/vegan friends and family. All five of you are highly talented, successful, lovely people. However, until someone proves the data in the graph below, I’m serving my kids chicken, even if my youngest son calmly stabs it with a fork and announces “cold chicken’s not really my thing, can I microwave this?”

Eldest daughter is now doing her best to behave and I am seriously considering giving up on attending the parenting classes and teaching them instead.

It is MUCH better to be STUPID and unemployed/disabled

May 21, 2015 ~ drjfernihough ~ Leave a comment

This week has been a bitty one to be honest. One sensory review of my smallest ADHD son, coupled with the ever increasing joy of signing on and parenting classes. Let’s start with the post though, and a refusal to renew the Disability Living Allowance for our eldest son who was born with bilateral cataracts and CMV infection. He only uses one eye, so has no 3D vision and what vision he has is low contrast, with poor visual acuity. His CMV infection has left him with a strange way of viewing the world. I spent half an hour with him recently trying to answer the question, “Mimi, what would happen if you’re stuck in a queue of traffic that’s not moving and as a result of an emergency you had to go backwards?” No amount of “you can’t drive backwards over the car behind you” was an acceptable response apparently. As his parents, we spend a significant amount of time helping him to make himself understood, adjusting his environment to remove visual hazards or helping him navigate his environment when it can’t be changed and making sure his glasses are clean and in front of his eyes, not half way down his face. As a result, he doesn’t manage too badly. This is particularly true when he doesn’t actually go anywhere new very often because we’re too exhausted or broke to go anywhere new with him. Therefore, he lives in a familiar, (visually speaking), world and he is bright enough to compensate for poor vision by using his brain. This requires a huge amount of effort for him, so comes at a cost to his ability to process mental challenges simultaneously. However, he’s smart, and at the age of 10, when nothing he does at school taxes his brain hugely, he manages this pretty well too. So, when he’s assessed for his level of disability he doesn’t rate as “vegetable” and is therefore not in need of significantly more care than his peers. If you’ve already invested significantly more care on your disabled son, you will reach a point where objective analysis deprives you of the means to continue providing that support. If you’re too stupid to do anything imaginative and constructive to help your son’s mental development and your son isn’t smart enough to compensate for his visual challenges by using his brain, you can receive £70 a week to spend in Lidl to feed your baby peperami (later my dear reader, bear with me). Instead, the benefits bill is clearly being cut significantly by removing entitlement from all the smart disabled people who have found their own alternative strategies intelligently and independently.

Which brings me on to my smallest son, currently (at least) in receipt of disability living allowance for ADHD with oppositional defiance disorder (ODD). The school staff, and us as his parents, are still at a loss to identify some of the triggers that cause spontaneous combustion of smallest son. These outbursts are violent and troubling for everyone involved, so solving this issue would be handy. Suggestion has been made that they may be sensory in origin so this week we went off to have a sensory assessment. As an aside until I had actually parked the car and already committed myself to a £3 fee, and gone through to the reception desk, I did not actually know what on earth the appointment was for. A full page letter received week ago, scattered with barcodes, snowflake codes, hospital number, an NHS number and lengthy text about parking and missed appointments said nothing about what the appointment itself was actually about. It could have been bed wetting. However, as the waiting list for this is so long, Connor has worked with the Rodger bedwetting system and/or grown out of this long before the referral has come through. I called over a week ago to try and find out why we needed a paediatric occupational therapist in our lives, and spoke to an answering machine. My voicemail was later called back, but no information left. When I rang up on the day, the reason for this lack of information became clear as there was no record of anyone making the referral at all. Instead they asked if my smallest son “had issues” to try and ascertain just which ones were being addressed that day. I resisted the urge to refer the paediatric occupational therapy department to my earlier post and promised to turn up at the prescribed time and place.

So, a sensory assessment is clearly an exciting thing for a bright 7 year old to do. Balancing, jumping, socks on and off, counting to 10 with your eyes closed whilst simultaneously doing things with opposable thumbs, it’s a riot. When he discovers that the “aim” of the game is to score 3 rather than 1 for each task, it becomes an Olympic sport. This level of activity, focused on getting an ever higher score appeals so much, that all thoughts of chewing pencils, defying orders or having a mega strop are long forgotten. End result, we have a kid with strong preferences (all school food is disgusting) and extremely high activity levels, but no dominating sensory issues. His level of ability means that all available strategies, like close fitted, stretchy, “huggy” shirts will be less than useless.

Note to self, stop carrying huggy shirt to and from school each day in the hopes that one day smallest son will think it is a good idea to wear this.

I did ask briefly if they thought if they thought that the child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) would be able to help, but this was not only outside their area of expertise but also pretty unlikely by the looks of the facial expression I got back during the polite silence. The parenting classes I’m doing are the gateway for access to CAMHS which now inspires me even less……….

On the topic of parenting classes, my dear reader, what can I tell you? Nothing I’m afraid, I am forbidden by confidentiality to blog on this topic. So instead I will delight you with information on the geographic area immediately surrounding the location of the classes: specifically, the city’s brand new Lidl. Now we’ve had a Waitrose in town for as long as people have been rubbing two sticks together and using them to eat sushi. A Lidl is a very new addition and a long way away from the centre of town/Waitrose/the library. As I needed to get some ingredients for supper after the parenting classes I thought I’d go in and see what the fuss is all about. It was also lunchtime so I thought I’d pick up a sandwich. Once I’d walked past the opening aisles (plural) of biscuit based carbohydrate, I was relieved to hear another couple ask someone for the location of ready-made sandwiches. They were shown to the location of the deep fill BLT and cheese ploughman sandwiches. That’s it, that’s the whole range. The couple decided they weren’t interested. As you can see from the image below this was a wise decision, with hindsight. However, it turns out this was not a decision made for themselves, oh no, it was made for their son in arms, probably no more than a year old. Before I had time to think “thankfully at least one couple in this neighbourhood knows how to bring their kid up moderately well after all” the father turned to the mother and said, “oh well, let’s go and get him a pepperami then”. *sigh*

Back home I quickly fill out the online form to prove I’m looking for work. This is dutifully ignored the next day as I sign on. I ask if the job centre has any support from/access to companies that can sponsor me to get security clearance in order to be eligible for MOD contracts. At the immediately blank faced response, I pointed out that the online information makes it clear that I cannot apply myself; I need a sponsor and that personal contacts have told me that there is a six months backlog in people waiting for clearance and hence a lot of jobs available. The blank face continues to be blank. I knew this was a waste of time, it’s just too much fun not to try. “Have you tried the .gov web page to find a list of companies?” I tried to explain (again) that I know there’s a list of companies that can do the sponsoring, I wanted to know if the job centre could actually put me in touch with one of them. My question has been noted (on a post-it) for the advisor at my next appointment to help me with. We spend the rest of the 10 minutes appointment discussing my adviser’s month long holiday in Thailand he’s going on soon. I can’t wait to sign with “a member of the manager’s team” next time. Be still my beating heart.

I did get to engage my brain cells briefly at a professor’s book launch at Bath University, on the topic of manufacturing in the UK. I was able to discuss starting our own companies with a fabulously smart MBA colleague and friend and ask a former member of the government how to improve gender equality in technical industries. None of us could identify the content of the canapes, but the future of “making” in the UK looks safer than I had previously thought.

So what did I learn this week? Parenting classes, signing on, getting access to DLA and probably many other state derived support mechanisms are all much easier to access if you have done nothing intelligent to help yourself first. This seems wrong. Granted, I’ve watched parents (years ago) frustrated with their toddler’s aggression towards an older brother, who did not realise the hypocrisy of smacking him to tell him so. These parents may, therefore, be too stupid to help themselves and need state intervention. There’s a strong argument for the state being there to help those who cannot help themselves. Should the reverse logic be equally true, that those who can help themselves don’t get support when they need it? The quality of the state intervention leaves so much to be desired in this situation. The job centre may be the best oxymoron ever and the health service may be beyond repair. I certainly can’t fix either one myself, the worrying thing is that I haven’t seen much evidence that the people inside the government can either.

Vodafone- I’m loyal, not masochistic

May 11, 2015 ~ drjfernihough ~ Leave a comment

As a bona fide geek, I joined the line of people waiting for the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge phone last month, and when I saw its metallic beauty in the shops at last, I called Vodafone customer services (191) from my decrepit elderly iPhone in order to upgrade. I’m calling this day, April 14^th, Tuesday, Day 0. After pointing out to the Vodafone man at the end of the phone that their packages were more expensive than all other providers put together and I could just go to Carphone Warehouse for a much better deal, I was instantly offered a 25% discount. I ummed and aaaed further as the Vodafone signal at our house is on a par with a cup and piece of string, so there’s a lot to be gained from leaving Vodafone. My umming and aaahing got me a further 5% discount, apparently the maximum he could do, bringing the monthly contract bill for the hottest phone in town to £37.80. I had to pay £9 upfront for the “gold” handset, which is actually way more beautiful than it sounds. Excited beyond belief, I got a text on my phone promising next day delivery with DPD.

Day 1, April 15^th, Wednesday, I waited in all day for DPD to bring my shiny new plaything. No phone. No additional text suggesting that it will ever be with me.

Day 2, April 16^th, Thursday I call Vodafone, which is a fairly tortuous procedure through menu item 1 (problems with your account) followed by menu item 3 (upgrading) to get through to a random person as there isn’t a menu offering that says “hacked off with not having a Galaxy S6 phone here yet? Press 4”. The next thing you need to do is put your phone number into the system as although they can detect the number you’re calling from, this may not be the account you want to talk to them about. This would be a genius bit of process were it not for the fact that the very first question you get asked by every operator after that is “what is your phone number?” Once you’ve put your number in, at top volume the next thing you hear is “GREAT NEWS! The Galaxy S6 is here!” Irony noted, I finally get through to a real someone who tells me that in fact they don’t have any stock yet, and so it is likely to be Friday or Monday that I will receive my phone. I thank him and wait until Monday, when of course, I do not receive my phone. As the delivery slot runs to 6pm and the Vodafone lines are open until 6pm, it is Tuesday before I can call again.

Day 7, April 21^st, Tuesday. I go through the whole menu, phone number inputting, “GREAT NEWS!” message and hold music to get through to a helpful man at Vodafone who gives me £10 credit on my account straight away for the inconvenience of not having my new phone yet. I should have been suspicious that this part of their system works well, but I feel quite amused that now Vodafone have paid me £1 for me to wait for my phone. Helpful Vodafone man also has access to a system that tells him that my phone is in the first batch to be delivered next, which will either be Friday or Monday. I begin to suspect that all Vodafone call centre trainees are told that their customers have goldfish like memories and one good weekend out will wipe their minds of calling 191 and listening to John Newman singing “Know I’ve done wrong, Left your heart torn, Is that what devils do? Took you so low, Where only fools go” for 20 minutes on a loop.

Day 11, April 25^th Saturday I get a text to say that my parcel is on its way and I can track it with DPD online. Thrilled to the core, I do just that. At 2:51am it was in a ‘hub’ in Birmingham and is on its way to a depot very near me. Monday, it’s got to be Monday, I’m going to get my phone on Monday.

Day 13, April 27^th, Monday, I don’t get my phone. By the time I realise I am definitely not getting my phone today, it is too late to call Vodafone.

Day 14, April 28^th, Tuesday. I have to go out first thing for the thrill that is parenting classes and when I return home, my heart sinks to see the little red sheet of paper on the floor of my hall. DPD are “sorry to have missed me”. I am invited to track my parcel online where I can also change my delivery date. Online, my parcel is still “on its way to the nearest depot” and there is no option to change or do anything about that. Then I remind myself – DPD are not in the delivery business. Bear with me, because I’m sure you’re thinking they have white vans, surely one of the D’s in their name must stand for delivery? No. The only thing DPD deliver are little notes to say “sorry we missed you”. The numbers on these do not correspond to your package, so they can try multiple times and all you will get are more little numbers. DPD’s business model is to get you to call them. They do not have a freephone number, but they do have long hold music and cheery people who try to talk to you for ages. They have to do this to a certain extent, because they are also trying to search through their systems to match up a random number generator (the card through your door) with one box in a million in a depot somewhere. Once they’ve tried to do this for me, and failed, they ask me if I am expecting more than one parcel. If so, I need to call the sender and ask them where it is. I point out that if I was expecting a second parcel, I would have tried the tracking number for that parcel, and got a different message online, so clearly I am not. So who exactly should I call about a parcel that I am not expecting? I give up with DPD and call Vodafone. “GREAT NEWS!”……. they suggest I call DPD as they have no information on my parcel other than “it’s on its way”.

Day 15, April 29^th, Wednesday. I spend 3 hours dialling 191 10 times, yes, ten times. “Now I’m rising from the ground, Rising up to you, Filled with all the strength I found, There’s nothing I can’t do. I told you once I can’t do this again, do this again, oh no” – John Newman’s ‘Love me Again’ hold music was an apt, if not slightly repetitive, anthem for my afternoon with Vodafone. Part of the 3 hours was spent on hold because I had initially joined their queuing system 3 times and waited for them to call me back. However, even though I was sat in my office less than 2m away from a Vodafone “Sure Signal” box, all I got were voicemail messages saying that Vodafone had tried to call me. I did get through to someone once, they put me on hold to look at the system and half an hour later I was literally losing the will to live and wanted lunch. As there’s no chance of getting a signal outside my office, I hung up and Chose Life. The last person I got through to after another half an hour on hold told me that there was nothing she could to help, and there were no systems she could check as the last person I spoke to “has opened an inquiry” to see where my phone has gone. This can take up to 5 days. She admitted that they had lost my phone, and in fact, that entire shipment. At £700 per phone, that’s quite a loss for a company that appears to be competing on cost rather quality of service. Beyond fed up, I let this woman know that if they haven’t found a metallic Galaxy S6 Edge to deliver to me at the end of the inquiry I will be going to Carphone Warehouse.

Day 21, May 5^th, Tuesday. With the Monday being a bank holiday, I would have called Vodafone on this Tuesday, except I was in the middle of the Peak District for a photography day with my mum. We had just had a wonderful lunch seeing a former colleague I haven’t seen for 10 years, hearing about her brilliant work outlined on www.breathingremedies.co.uk and we were all set for a day of beautiful landscapes. As our most knowledgeable and lovely tutor Stephen Elliott turned up, I reached into my pocket to turn my phone off, only to see that Vodafone had chosen that precise moment to call me. The all too familiar terrible, crackly line and Indian accent made me realise I was in for a good 5 minutes of pre-amble before the reason for the call became clear. The caller told me that I should have received my new phone two weeks ago. I told her I knew this. She apologised profusely for losing my phone, and I thanked her. She promised me that I would receive a new phone the next day, she was sorting it out for me NOW, to make sure I did not have to wait any longer. I received a text almost instantaneously to support this claim. The only slight snag in this whole plan was that the next day, I was still in the Peak District a good 4 hours at least from my house. There was no way I could bear to hear the overly loud and cheery “GREAT NEWS!” again, never mind listen to the hold music again, so I simply said “that’s great, I need to go now, thank you.” Manic texting followed to make sure my wonderful neighbour was OK with being available until 3pm and to my husband to put a note on the door to that effect. Finally, phone off, smile in place, I had a great day out and even managed to get a couple of good photos despite the weather.

Day 22, May 6^th, Wednesday. Exhausted, I arrived back in Bath in time to sign on in town, with my semi-regular guy. He asked me to use the electronic system and I couldn’t resist asking what benefit this gave over pen and paper. Call me cynical, but I had not seen a great benefit in any electronic system for a good few weeks. I was reassured that not only did the electronic system confirm that my signature was 98% similar to my last one, but it also approved my payment as well. I stopped short of asking how much longer he expected to be sitting on his side of the desk in the face of technology doing 98% of his job. I decided to go home and get my phone instead. So I thought………….. Once again, I realise that my text is only information that a phone is somewhere in limbo between Vodafone and a DPD depot and there’s no confirmation of anticipated delivery. Online tracking tells me that DPD is “experiencing technical difficulties in locating my parcel”. Just for the hell of it I call 191. Apparently, there’s great news: the Galaxy S6 phone is here! Once I get past the ironic announcements, menu items, hold music and an obligatory being cut off and starting all over again, because suspiciously, they no longer seem to have a queuing system whereby they call you back; I am told by a real person that Vodafone have no stock of this phone and they have no idea how or why I was called with a delivery promise.

Day 23, May 7^th, Thursday. It’s my birthday and so I decide to celebrate by NOT calling 191. I go out into town and put a note on the door asking any delivery driver to try half the village before leaving a note but no parcel. I have a great day, and decide that I will call Vodafone the next day.

Day 24, May 8^th, Friday. “GREAT NEWS!” More hold music, and two hours later I get through to someone. I’m so fed up I ask if I can still cancel my contract as it has been longer than the 14 days cooling off period since I started it. As I haven’t even received my phone, this action is indeed possible. I drive into town, park in Sainsbury’s to get an emergency 6 pints of milk (this lasts ~3 days in our house) and 90 minutes free parking and walk straight to one of the four Carphone Warehouse shops in town. 90 minutes later and £100 extra cost compared to Vodafone over 24 months I have a Galaxy S6 Edge phone in my hand and a contract with EE for £31.99 a month. Better reception in my home town, better service from the Geek Squad and staff in the shop use a computer system that can identify where their stock is, live. I even have a spare phone so that if there is any gap in service as the PAC code migrates, I will have a phone I can be reached on. How did we manage when phone screens were this small?

My life is complete, or will be after just one more task. I call 191 and ask to cancel my contract. I am put on hold. When the person finally returns, she tells me that my phone is on its way, it’s being delivered with DPD, she can see that this has been delayed…………………. I have to stop her and remind her that I called to cancel my contract, not to be told the same thing I have been told for 23 days and could she please do what her customer has asked and cancel my contract. I am told to wait on hold while I am put through to cancellations. Half an hour later I am back with her and she tells me she is putting me through to Ian in cancellations. I am on hold again and another 10 minutes later, I finally talk to Ian. He offers to sort out my phone delivery for me. I stop short of hanging up as this might actually be the last call I have to make to 191 ever and I tell Ian that I do not want anything more from Vodafone at all. Ian offers to drop the monthly contract price. I resist the urge to sing back to him the hold music song Vodafone have been playing at me for days and which is now permanently etched in my brain, “It’s unforgivable, I stole and burnt your soul, Is that what demons do?, They rule the worst of me, Destroy everything, They bring down angels like you, Can you love me again?”

I tell him that I am happy to pay an extra £100 to leave Vodafone and there is nothing he can do to keep me, especially by dropping the monthly cost. I tell him that I value good customer service and promises being kept, and will pay for this even though I am in fact not even earning at the moment. I don’t appreciate companies who compete on cost alone to the point where all value has been removed for both the company and the customer. In the time it takes me to say that (rant), Ian has cancelled my contract and got my PAC code for me. Now totally unsurprised that this bit of Vodafone’s system works well, I pick my kids up from school and play with my new and very lovely phone.

43 hours in the care of the NHS

April 27, 2015 ~ drjfernihough ~ Leave a comment

Today I am continuing a theme that I love: process, and the absence of its value when someone could have been left to use their brain instead. Don’t get me wrong, to paraphrase a quite brilliant fellow MBA colleague, process porn excites me just as much as the next Project Manager. I love the way it can enhance our lives when everything is there at the touch of a button. Then we call it “intelligence by design” or “user friendly” to avoid using the ugly word, “process”. But process is only dehumanising when it fails, raining absurd crushing blows on our heads, sending us internally spinning, and often into a lengthy British queue. I’m getting ahead of myself……………..

Recently, my husband and I spent one of those days juggling one kid off to a cub-scout day trip, one off to badminton club and with the third pair of hands, one kid went to the park to exhaust me. Never did I realise you could push someone on a zip-wire, for hours……..

Suitably exhausted I returned home to find number one girl curled up on the settee clutching her phone, looking particularly more emo than usual. This is the exact moment I learned at what age people start Googling symptoms to self-diagnose an illness. The answer is 11. Suspected appendicitis cannot be treated with painkillers or a hot water bottle for fear of rupture and instant death (I’m paraphrasing WebMD on her phone here). To be honest, if the lower right quadrant of your belly hurts like hell and the left side doesn’t, appendicitis was all I had to go on too, so off we went to the nearest A&E, time of arrival 3:15. Obviously, you can’t park near A&E. If you’re not ill enough to turn up with all sirens blaring in an ambulance you have a 20 minute drop off waiting zone (full) or the maternity car park half a mile away.

So, I’m trying to carry an 11 year old in my arms like a baby from the maternity wing car park. I get as far as the maternity wing (i.e. 10 metres) before I want to collapse, breathless and in agony. Looking not dissimilar to every other patient arriving at the maternity wing, I rush in, looking for a wheelchair. A saint of a porter appears out of nowhere and number one girl is chauffeured round to A&E, in the fetal position. There, she is rushed through as an emergency case for triage. Because a nurse says so, she also agrees to take some paracetamol. She is “overbooked” on the next available appointment at 4pm.

Here’s the first part of my process confusion, how do you get to the point where double booking an appointment is a normal process? Have they cloned the staff to be able to do this effectively? The waiting room was pretty much standing room only with loads of kids with suspected broken limbs, still dressed in football kit. One young girl was skipping with a bloody nose and a scraped knee. I can’t help thinking that perhaps a tube of savlon and some paracetamol was all many of them really needed, not a four hour wait sat next to a paranoid, anxious parent, hoping to be double booked over someone else’s suspected broken wrist.

Surprisingly at exactly 4pm, my girl is called through to see another nurse to go through exactly the same triage process as before, only with the addition of a urine sample request and without the paracetamol again. Also, I suspect because the nurses are fed up of documenting scraped knees on the computer system, our answers are first written on the back of an envelope (I kid you not) before being typed up after we leave that room. It’s a tricky process getting an unsteerable wheelchair alongside a toilet cubicle so that a girl bent double with pain can wee into a small pot inside, but we managed. Don’t ask me to repeat that task.

Second point of confusion, why not just copy the stuff from one form onto the next form? How are our answers going to differ from one hour to the next? Why even have a second form if it has all the same questions on it? One of the questions sounds like, “Is she known to cams?” If you understand this question, then you know it is actually “Is she known to CAMHS, which is the child and adolescent mental health services. If you answer this question, “no” rather than “what is cams?” no-one bats an eyelid or asks how you have come across the mental health services if it wasn’t for one of your kids. I was all ready to say “Oh, it’s our youngest son who’s clearly insane” but no, the box has been ticked, job done. Nurse number 2 seems very skilled and lovely, and “cannot rule out appendicitis” as the urine sample is fine. She’s “going to be assertive” and demand that a doctor sees my daughter. We’re sent round to the paediatric ward half an hour later, and ours not to reason why, but here’s the process on arrival, which in practice is about an hour after we arrive……………A nurse has a look at her, and asks ALL THE SAME QUESTIONS AGAIN, including the urine sample request. This time the urine test has a cardboard bowl to put under the toilet seat with a sterile packaged, plastic container insert inside, which has to be weed into, but only after opening it without compromising its sterility. I go and fetch another wheelchair………… Apparently, although the last nurse wrote up her notes from the back of an envelope onto the system, a) this did not include the results of the urine sample and b) they have big blue folders on the wall of the paediatric wards and you need to click paper in and out of these to look efficient, so to generate more paperwork, we have to start again.

It is now 5:30 and the nurse recommends taking a blood sample so that the results will be available to the doctor when they arrive to help their decision making. “That’s great” I say, “How long does it take to get the blood results then? What time do you expect the doctors to come round?” Here are the clues to the answers I’m expecting: How long = answer in units of minutes/hours; what time = something O’clock. The answers I actually got were, “oh, they come back almost immediately” and “she called me 15 minutes ago, so not long I imagine”. Right, let’s start with “they come back almost immediately” shall we? I distinctly remember weeping into many biochemical tests in a hospital based lab as a PhD student, so I have a little bit of experience with these. It’s really very frustrating to spend two days carefully moving very small, and usually radioactive solutions from one type of tiny tube to another, only to discover that in your sleep deprived state, you wired up the terminals to the last machine in the process the wrong way round and now your samples are swimming in vast quantities of (also now radioactive) solution that you need to carefully clean up and pour down an appropriate sink somewhere. There were no tests that gave you results “almost immediately”. I understand that tests designed for the NHS have to be more robust than the ones I cocked up years ago, but still, the results are not coming back, “almost immediately”. I would bet my hospital parking fee on it. Moving on, how does the past event of “she called me 15 minutes ago” relate in any meaningful way to the arrival time of said doctor? She may live in Timbuktu, she may have 15 wards to walk round and 20 life-saving surgeries to perform before she gets to the blue folder filled paradise that is room 16.

So, sure in the knowledge that it is 5:30pm, but absolutely none the wiser on anything else, we watch anaesthetic cream being put on the back of my daughter’s hand, which will take half an hour to work, after which time, the blood test will be done.

6:35, blood test performed. No doctor around. She’s still nil by mouth and getting hungry. At about 7, dad turns up with the welcome distraction of brothers. As a new face on the scene, dad asks a nurse if there’s any danger of seeing a doctor or a blood test result any time soon. “The blood test results will take an hour” and “the doctors are on their way”. I bite my tongue. Eldest brother asks me why they can’t just X-ray his sister to find out if she has appendicitis. Grateful for the diversion, I discuss the use of X-rays with him and their ability to see bone, but not wiggly appendices, and the value of high resolution, but expensive imaging techniques like MRI and CT scans, versus cheaper, quicker, low resolution techniques like ultrasound.

8pm, we go wild and crazy and ask again if either a blood test result or a doctor are going to turn up any time soon. Miraculously the doctor appears and lets us know that blood test results take two hours to come back. He also asks my girl pretty much, all the same questions we have now answered three times already. However, this time we have brothers present, which livens up the process enormously. When asked if the previous day’s activity was normal, youngest son’s hand shoots up: boy does he know the answer to this one: “we cycled to the river where you can swim and I found a dead fish and a live mussel”. Unfortunately, this information has minimal clinical relevance and the doctor smiles politely. This is seen as a cue for eldest son (aged 10) to ask very bluntly, “Why don’t you just do an ultrasound to look at her appendix?” Gloriously shocked into action, the doctor informs us (in words of one syllable, despite the clear understanding that my son has of the situation, never mind his rather academically qualified parents) that this is exactly what they will do in the morning. Nil by mouth restriction is lifted and supper is offered to my picky eating number one girl. When I say supper, I believe the exact offering was “I think we have a cheese and tomato or egg sandwich in the fridge still?” The look of horror on my girl’s face was enough to send me to the only thing open on a Sunday evening, a vending machine, so that she could eat an entire bag of Haribo Starmix (other types of carpet underlay are available). This can only be good for someone who has essentially had nothing to eat all day on top of severe bowel pain.

9:55pm, a surgical registrar comes to tell us that her blood test results are all normal, which is not strictly true as I pestered the nurses at 9pm and they said that “a couple of things are raised”. They’d like to keep an eye on her overnight before the ultrasound the following morning. My daughter is distraught as it has finally sunk in that she is definitely going to miss her maths test the next day. I drive home to get an overnight bag, incurring a £6 parking charge to leave the car park, even though this is the fee for anything over 5 hours, up to 24 hours. Although I am back within the hour there is no button to inform the machine of this and I start the whole parking ticket process all over again. I return to the ward with teddies and kiss my girl goodnight. Then I go to parents’ room 3 to sleep under the thinnest blanket ever manufactured, whilst ironically bearing a label that says “Imperial quality”; perhaps it was at the time Britain had an empire. I am reminded that your importance to the clinical care of the patient is directly correlated to the temperature of your surroundings. If you are the patient, you are placed in a room heated roughly to body temperature. If you are a mere parent, you are in an unheated room with draughty windows, where the curtains stop 6 inches short of the window ledge.

Any visible source of heating with apparent thermostatic controls is simply there to lull you into a false sense of warm security. I spend the night fully clothed, putting two threadbare towels on top of my imperial quality blanket in an attempt to remain warm blooded. Day 2 continues in the post below.

7am, Monday morning, on the paediatric ward

April 27, 2015 ~ drjfernihough ~ Leave a comment

After a surprisingly OK shower, I head towards the parents’ kitchen which proudly bears the sign “free tea and coffee” on the door. I need to defrost; I do not need powdered coffee with no milk. Note to self – find café. I go to see how my girl is getting on, still fast asleep in bed, so I return to my room to tidy up. It is only now I appreciate the true beauty of my temporary accommodation. What more could an anxious parent need than Monet’s “Waterloo – Gray Day” painting on the wall to cheer them up? Surely the picture they left down the back of the plastic armchairs was better than this?

8am – despite being told that breakfast starts at 7am and the ward round would start at 8:30, cold toast and rice crispies are just arriving now. This is followed by the water jug game. This hasn’t changed in the 10 years since I spent a few nights in with my eldest son, and it’s a hoot, you’ll love it. In the searing heat of the wards, water is pretty essential, some might say, as essential as the medical care given here. So, with my love of process shining bright, it is always curious to me that every morning all the water jugs are removed from the ward as these could be a source of infection and are therefore a health risk to be removed. However, it is not the job of the person who removes the water jugs to replace them. Oh no. This happens later, much later, much much later when dehydration has set in, particularly for nursing mothers. So the water jug game involves smiling sweetly (a lot) and walking around the floor trying to find the rare beasty that is a jug and two cups, or even better, a nurse who can find these for you. Eventually we find water and dad arrives to take over at 9:30. I have an appointment on the other side of town in half an hour, persuading predominantly female life science researchers to become entrepreneurs.

It strikes me that on balance, being a female, techy entrepreneur is considerably less stressful than being a parent. Many, many women leave well paid jobs armed with little more than breasts to take up the mantle of childcare single handed, whilst dad tries to keep his eyes open at the desk job. The woman is left on her own at home with an incredibly valuable, challenging, essentially unpaid job, 24/7 with no training. Not getting it right first time is really risky. If you sit and listen to Margaret Heffernan (http://www.mheffernan.com/index2.php) and I am lucky to have done so on more than one occasion, starting and running a company is remarkably similar to having children. So how is it that when asked, many women would not start their own company, citing the challenges of fitting this round children as one of many imagined barriers? If you’ve even considered having children or actually managed it without the intervention of social services I cannot think of anything more invigorating and suited to your skills base than starting a company.

I digress. Whilst I am persuading a fabulous scientist to pursue her dream, my husband is watching my daughter’s internal organs being examined by ultrasound. I return to the ward at 3pm, for the changing of the guard (dad does actually have a job to go to) and to hear my girl declare herself as “losing the will to live”. In practice this means it’s time to eat a KitKat (other forms of dental decay inducing, chocolate based life forms are available). Having eaten baked beans for lunch I can’t help thinking once again that my daughter’s diet since entering hospital and sitting in bed all day has not exactly been ideal for intestinal disorders. My daughter spends much of the day having 1:1 art tuition with an amazing woman and has already amassed a sizeable collection of plaster of paris artifacts that need painting. An educational assistant keeps walking round and remarking on our daughter’s maths skills. I wonder if she is officially employed by the hospital for frequent flyers/long stay car parkers; simply volunteering, or whether the nursing staff have just given up on trying to get her to leave the building.

5pm, and a mere 7 hours after the ultrasound has been performed, all internal organs are declared fit for purpose (in words of one syllable of course), if not swimming in a little more fluid than is normal, by another surgical registrar. They’d still like to keep an eye on her for another night. Smiling, the doctor leaves. Staying, my girl bursts into tears. I text my husband and warn him we’re going to need warm bedclothes and another spare change of clothes. My girl has supper – a jacket potato with a side order of potato wedges. They have no soup, and the ice cream is “the same as school’s, I’m not eating that”. *sigh*

7pm that evening, dad turns up with a second overnight bag to do a swap for the nightshift. The bag contains no change of underwear for our daughter and no change of clothes for me at all. He has brought the film Maze Runner on a USB stick, chocolate brownies and our daughter’s duvet. He holds up our eldest son’s sleeping bag for the arctic parents’ room and offers to stay the night. I let him; at least as far as his knees, he’ll be warm. Youngest son wants to stay and watch the DVD. There are many problems with this, not least the fact that this is not going to fit into the free 20 minutes parking allowed. Despite looking like the mutant lovechild of Metal Mickey and a Nintendo Wii, there is no remote control for the “Starlight” system. As a result, it’s almost impossible to hear the film from two foot in front of the screen, and my daughter has already watched the first half hour twice as a result of hitting the stop button on the front of the player, but without being able to hit fast forward on the remote. This lack of remote control is slightly dampening its promise of “brightening the lives of seriously ill children” emblazoned on the side.

To be honest, it’s a blessing in disguise as Maze Runner is not entirely appropriate for the 6 year old girl in the bed next door (or our youngest son for that matter) and we’ve killed another half hour of time with the DVD repeat. I manage to tear our youngest son away from playing with the bed controls and take him home in time to avoid a parking fine and to pick up the eldest son from cubs.

9:30am Day 3 and I’m back on the ward as soon as the school run is done. This was a slightly prolonged affair as it involved 1) a lot of parents asking after our daughter (lovely); 2) the receptionist remarking on the fact that the educational assistant up at the hospital had already called and informed them that our daughter had been discharged (inaccurate, slightly creepy and in breach of confidentiality somewhere I’m sure) and 3) a friend asking if I can watch her son for 15 minutes later that day (a walk in the park after the last couple of days especially given the laid back nature of their son compared to ours). Back at the hospital and again, in the magic 20 minutes allowed by the ruler of free parking, I hand my slowly defrosting husband a cup of tea and he leaves for work. In reality this involves telling him that I have left the tea on the desk at reception as you’re not allowed hot drinks on the ward. Hot food is barely allowed in, it’s only fair.

A few minutes later, just as I am preparing myself for a long haul DVD watching/bird drawing/heart painting session and texting the parenting classes’ teacher to let her know I can’t make week 2 of 11, the surgical consultant shows up with a whole clutch of green student medics flurrying in his wake. They all remain silent while he barks at one blue clothed doctor for the blood test results. Armed with data, the anomalous, raised results are read out to a reception of total apathy. A little bit of excess peritoneal fluid is also unimpressive if you’re female, apparently. So, with that, we are free to go. They are happy to keep her in for longer but if I am confident to keep an eye on her at home, she is officially discharged. My daughter is already putting her shoes on and hobbling, bent over in slight pain, for the door. I reassure the consultant that despite not being medically qualified, I have a suspicion I might be just fine. He smiles, calls me a proper Dr, and provides cursory details on what circumstances would warrant returning. I walk half way round the hospital to pay the additional £12 parking fee, with coins, no cards accepted, no change possible. If anyone in the family is seriously ill now they are in grave trouble as I have just blown my job seekers allowance at the same rate it was accrued solely on parking one car.

What did we learn:

My daughter, when asked, “how are you?” now answers with a number on a 0-10 pain score scale as she has been accustomed to doing at two hourly intervals for the last 43 hours to generate a lot of completed forms for nurses.
There are a LOT of things that your body can do that will baffle the most senior of medics and for which an army of tests will be inconclusive. You will be absolutely fine.
It will have cost the NHS several hundreds of pounds to complete 1 and 2 for which I am eternally grateful, but also feel could have been better spent somewhere else. Perhaps on some training on managing customers’ expectations; subtitled “how not to lie about how long all NHS processes take and report past events as a false guide to future ones”.
Don’t google your symptoms, simply follow the scheme below:

Do you need to attend A&E? (Follow these instructions at your own peril)

Have you had an accident that has caused your limb to be seriously bent at an awkward angle, NOT where it normally bends? If yes – go to A&E.

If no, have you had an accident that caused your parent to go white as a sheet, as though they are very scared and/or sick and they are trying not to cry? If yes, lie them down, reassure them everything will be fine, administer tea and wait for a bit. If you were able to do this without hitting a 10 on the pain scale, i.e. the worst pain imaginable, take paracetamol, neurofen and savlon as necessary and stay at home with a DVD player with a working remote control.

If you have not had an accident, but are in pain; as they say in Big Hero 6, “woman up”, at home. Take paracetamol and neurofen as necessary and watch your temperature. If your pain reduces, even slightly, after 30-40 minutes and your temperature remains normal, the drugs are, on this occasion, working. Rest, perhaps with a DVD player with a working remote control.

Do you have a high temperature, vomiting, pain and diarrhoea? If yes, you probably do need to go to A&E and there will probably be a sign on the door saying that anyone with a sickness bug is not allowed on the ward. Pack a decent overnight bag with you, using an ascent on Mt Everest after a long haul flight with airport parking paid in cash as the guide for the quality and quantity for the contents.

laugh or cry

Share this page if it makes you laugh. Contact me if it makes you cry, we need a beer together

Unemployment