Plaid Shirt Guy: The hero we need? Weekend open thread

@Nanny Oggs Busom:

I’ve applied for PIP for the third time as well, last mopnth. So many forms, so much evidence. Because being mentally ill and autistic doesn’t bring enough stress, the government have to provide extra.

It often feels like they intentionally go out of their way to make it difficult with these things.

OESP: “Do this online questionnaire. Oh, but then you have to print out this thing, sign it, and snail mail it back.”

“What if I don’t have a printer? Can’t you send me the form in the mail along with a postage-prepaid return envelope like literally EVERY OTHER ORGANIZATION that wants things mailed to them, including ALL other government departments?”

“No, it’s either print this form and pay the postage yourself, or call this number.”

*calls number*

*lengthy phone menu where the item to find an alternative to using a printer you don’t have is always the last in each list*

Five to ten minutes of listening and pushing number buttons later: “We’re sorry, no one is available to take your call right now.” CLICK. No hold, no voicemail, no prerecorded explanation of an alternative for people without printers, just CLICK.

Better hope the nearest public business or other place where you can use a printer isn’t a $200 and multi-hour Greyhound round trip away.

And semi-private heavily subsidized and regulated monopolies seem to work hand in hand with the government to try to screw you over.

ODSP: “Every so often, purely at random and unpredictably, we’ll mail you a giant wodge of forms and other junk you’ll need to fill in and mail back to keep receiving benefits. If you get the teensiest thing wrong, of course, at best your benefits get reduced or eliminated and at worst you go to jail for welfare fraud, so we’ll make sure there’s a billion niggling questions, half of them wordes so that there are commonplace ambiguous edge cases and you’ll have to guess then which answer we consider correct and which answer we consider felonious. You might want to consider hiring a lawyer no-one on disability can possibly afford.”

*starts filling in forms, carefully, oh so carefully*

“Oh, one more thing, we’ll also need you to mail us last month’s phone bill, a recent hydro bill, a recent rent receipt, etc. to prove your living expenses.”

“No problem. Oh wait, what’s this?”

BELL: “To cut costs, we will no longer be mailing printed utility bills to our customers unless you explicitly opt in, during this limited x-day window. Opting to continue receiving printed invoices will incur a surcharge of $2 a month.”

If you’re on ODSP, that’s going to be another $2 a month of living expenses, to make sure you have last month’s phone bill to mail back whenever they decide to audit your expenses for the umpteenth time. Unless of course you forgot to opt in with Bell until it was too late, or simply missed that message from them, in which case it’s going to be another $1100 a month of expenses … or maybe free room and board. With bars on the windows.

That’s just 2 examples of such fuckery. I could spend all day adding to this heap of Kafkaesque bullshit without coming *close* to the mine playing out.