COVID… it’s just an excuse for the workshy

‘So useless, it’s often referred to as Crapita’

MY missus woke up one morning in May last year to find she’d gone completely deaf. Not a bit deaf. Not “water in my ears” deaf. Actually deaf. As in ‘burst a balloon next to her for comedy purposes and she won’t even flinch’ style deaf.

Since then, she’s had a cochlear implant fitted inside her skull to assist her with electronic hearing.

It’s quite brilliant but has, however, cost us a small fortune in taxis and train fares and buses and hotel rooms because we don’t live in north Wales.

But we’re just about near enough to make it our “local” cochlear implant team for adults. Yes, we live in the north. Pretty much certain that in London, there’s probably a cochlear implant team at the end of every street.

It’ll be right next to the sparkly defibrillator unit and the actual open bank branch and the brand spanking new multi-zillion pound Tube station they’ve just opened. Again.

We weren’t just coping with one of us unable to hear.

We were also coping with her not being able to work while our outgoings went through the roof.

So we did as we were advised and applied for a Personal Independence Payment.

It’s essentially financial help with covering the ever-increasing travel costs of to-ing and fro-ing to a different country because similar services in our actual locality are non-existent. That was in February. On the day of typing this, it’s June 13, and the best the poor sods who man the phonebanks can tell me is that my missus’s claim is “in the hands of the assessors”.

Oh, and that her claim will be assessed “as soon as possible”. But… it’s been four months now. How long is this queue, I asked? “Well… COVID…,” came the pathetic reply. What about COVID? The rest of the country has moved on but, if you take the public shilling, apparently it’s still rampant and everyone everywhere is dying from it. Except, they aren’t, are they? Once thought of as a modern-day black plague, the dreaded lurgy is now reduced to an irritating sniffle.

Unless you’re on the Government payroll. Then it’s an iron-clad excuse to “work from home”, clad in cardboard-thick pyjamas and no doubt surrounded by half-eaten hotdogs and your cousin’s Netflix account log-in.

Please, I said to the girl I spoke to, tell me this claim hasn’t been outsourced to Capita, the never-endingly criticised private firm that gets so many governmental contracts.

“It is Capita, yes,” she replies. This is a firm so bad, so useless, so permanently under the spotlight, that Private Eye magazine often refers to it as Crapita.

And so, obviously, I got absolutely nowhere. We’re just in a queue. But we have no idea how long that queue is.

Or how long we’re even expected to be in it.

This is nothing whatsoever to do with COVID. And it’s nothing to do with Brexit. It’s absolutely everything to do with our so-called Civil Service.

Some of them are clearly f**king useless, lazy, workshy twats.

If they’re not going back to work, sack the whole bloody lot of them.