Georgie Barraclough: Dear Access to Work…

Georgie – this would be funny if I didn’t know how near the truth this is for you. My private audiologist has an ear trumpet in a case on his wall – perhaps he’ll let you try it out and save you a trip to Leeds!

You write with such humour: you always make me smile. Please keep sharing these thoughts and experiences! x

I’m not sure it’s AtWs fault deafie kit is stuck somewhere in the 1970s at best (my clients think my Minicom 6000p looks like a relic) but I must admit I’ve had some impressive nonsense from them and their assessors including:

Hopeless new inexperienced assessor got confused and decided the main reception phone was a minicom and recommended me only one part of a complex house alerting system instead of a wireless flashing doorbell. My employer didn’t believe me for ages and sorting it involved a monster email to AtW and hideous colleagues relaying phonecalls for me *shudder*. The reassessment however was fantastic and that lady taught me an awful lot of the “secrets” which I wish were published for everyone to know and not “secrets”.

My AtW caseworker and the whole system is obsessed by phones, I had to phone them to get my emails answered and they’d still say “Oh phone XYZ” and I’d always reply “I am deaf remember, I am telling you how much I hate phones and am struggling, email address required kthx” and grudgingly get an email address out of them. Wasting days between email replied and making me very annoyed.

The final straw with that caseworker was when I wanted to change my sign language budget to palantypy and they got that all confused with a minicom (which I was asking for an upgrade of) and sent me an email which made no sense. When I carefully (and more politely than they deserved) explained what each thing was and what it was for with links to websites they threw a hissy fit at me and kept trying to make me phone them and reapply from scratch.

The less said about the “reapply from scratch every time the moon changes” + stupidity about sending me electronic copies of my own damned data (previous application forms and reports) the better. I refused to back down on that this year and ended up making my employer pay for cutting edge 1970s tech cos AtW wouldn’t have funded it anyway cos of their 2010-2012 “no telephony” rules even though deafie telephony costs 10x that of hearie stuff.

I just resent that AtW don’t make it easy to communicate with them for deaf people. They only put their email addresses on their website in 2007 because I threw the Freedom of Information Act at them twice after the first attempt was ignored. AtW are the least flexible for “making adjustments” organisation I know and their disability knowledge outside of individual assessors (who had often been very good as well as occasionally hopeless) is pathetic. I would be ashamed to know so little about it if that was my job.

I hope you sent them that! Perhaps a badge that says simply, “Pardon?”

What lovely supportive comments, thank you. I know I’ve been a bit tongue in cheek – AtW’s recommdenations weren’t quite as outdated as I’ve suggested – but the process was still as painful. I felt they would benefit from a lesson in empathy. I will email you Beth, thank you. There are some times when I think that hi-vis vest would be useful though, like at the supermarket today when a woman rammed her trolley into my legs as I’d not jumped out of her way when she’d asked me to.