Jobcentre Plus Part 4 - 'Tis a Tangled Web We Weave(1/3) By Martin Nickson

(1/3), (2/3), (3/3), Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Thursday, 12 April 2007

I don't know how many of you have read Jared Diamond's work, but in his fine treatise Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a main tenant of the gentleman's work focuses on (perhaps I should have said 'talks about issues around') observations that the collapse of seemingly viable, complex civilisations - Maya, early Norse Northern Atlantic colonies in Iceland and Newfoundland and Easter Island - were immediately preceded by those same societies having to manufacture increasingly Byzantine, labyrinthine (and any other 'thine' you care to mention as long as its bizarrely complicated), solutions to the problems caused by each societies' own existence.

In the case of the Easter Islanders, not much is known about the causes of collapse, just that they went from a flourishing agricultural society capable of carving and erecting huge statues to a cannibalistic group wondering what went wrong as they chopped down the last tree for firewood. My own theory is that they decided to tackle the problems of survival on this tiny Pacific Island by opening a Jobcentre Plus.

Recent contacts with the Jobcentre have been immensely complex and have involved so many of their staff, from call centres in Newcastle, the Six Counties, Liverpool and Hull, that my current 'six degrees of separation' (AKA the Kevin Bacon game) score must now be reduced down to three or four degrees. The issue at hand at the moment is whether I qualify for Job Seekers Allowance or not.

I undoubtedly am seeking a job, so no problem there, and conversely I am undoubtedly unemployed and in sufficient need of money that I've signed up for the YouGov website - a British Government scheme whereby you answer on-line surveys and get paid £1.00 for each completed survey.

Of course, I adopt a completely different persona for each survey I complete. I'm either a vegetarian Australian or a Green Oil tycoon, so I try to keep my anarcho-syndicalist credentials alive but the money just keeps rolling in. The debate on my receipt of Job Seekers Allowance involves the Reciprocal Agreement between the UK and Canada. In short, if I qualify in Canada for EI, this qualification should transfer to the UK and I get paid JSA, at the princely rate of £50.00 per week.

The historical background of this agreement, clearly, is that the British Empire ruled Canada for a time and murdered many of its indigenous people, so it's a kind of Danegeld. Strangely, the British also murdered the French Canadians by the millions as well, but Quebec is excepted from this scheme. Unfortunately, it appears that for the cyborgs, processing a claim involving Reciprocal Agreements is tantamount to approaching a Magnetical Imageometer Resonatorister machine.

An MRI whatitsname thingy-magig is the fiendish instrument that Nel and other boffins power up every morning as they enter their mountain top laboratory- lots of coils, and test tubes and big power breakers to throw, accompanied by diabolical laughter and the unkempting of hair.

Continued .... Next Page (2/3)

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