Fuming...
Over the past week, I’ve been in a running argument with my JobActive provider, which started last Monday, the 1st of July. I showed up to my scheduled appointment, brought in my most recent payslip to date, attended the appointment, booked a new one in two weeks time, and, as far as I was aware, got marked as attending. This was at about 10.30am.
Fast forward to about 5.30pm. I get an SMS from my JobActive provider. My unemployment benefit is being cut off because I didn’t attend my appointment. Please phone their call centre if I think this might be a mistake.
I phone the call centre, explain the situation to the nice person on the other end of the line, and they say “yeah, looks like there might have been a mistake at the office, we’ll get them to fix it.” I hang up, go about my business.
Thursday morning, just before I head off to work, I get another SMS from my JobActive provider. Did I know my benefit had been cut off for not attending my interview on Monday, and could I please contact them to reconnect? Here’s the call centre number again.
Call the call centre again. Mention that a) I did attend the original interview in the first place; b) had called up about this on Monday Night, and been told this was going to be fixed back then; and c) wasn’t particularly happy about being delayed on my way to work (particularly since Thursday morning was a morning where there was a whacking great cold front off the coast, and I wanted to get to work before it hit). They assured me there was a record of my call on Monday night, and my attending the appointment on Monday, and this would be fixed, honest.
Today I log into the JobActive website, in order to do my weekly job-search and render myself eligible for receiving unemployment benefit. Only to discover that, surprise, surprise, my benefit is still marked as being suspended.
Which means my schedule for tomorrow has suddenly grown an urgent necessity to be down at my JobActive provider’s office at 9am on Monday morning, complete with every single piece of documentation I can lay hands on, in order to get this sorted out. As a result of their fuck-up, I am effectively losing out on a week’s worth of benefit income through no fault of my own. I have done everything I was supposed to do, and I’m getting screwed over. I am not happy, and I am going to be spreading the “not happy” around, in the politest and most aggressively reasonable fashion I can manage.
On top of all of this, the people who make the Scrivener writing software have apparently changed their e-commerce provider, and this has rendered my copy of Scrivener unregistered. I sent them a message through their website asking them to re-send me the relevant information a week ago, and it hasn’t arrived. I’ve tried again today, and I may have to escalate to direct contact with their customer service section in order to get this sorted out. Given they’re in the UK and I’m in Australia, this is not an optimal conversation to be having across an eight-hour time difference.
So, on top of having my benefit cut off, I’m also not able to get into my writing files and work on any of the large projects I was working on recently. As you can imagine, I am not a particularly happy camper at the moment.