Ever spent 61/2 hours sitting on a wooden bench waiting for a question to be answered, staring at glossy posters telling you about Respect, Duty of Care, Bullying and having Courageous Conversations? Well not really waiting for an answer, no fool would do that. No, waiting for a letter to be copied. I’d received my answer .. No! But, someone was apparently ‘seeing what they could do’. Of course someone would have actually needed to take the letter and copy it and then simply pass it on to be able to see what they could do … After all it was addressed to the doctor I’d asked for it to be passed onto.

They wouldn’t have known this, not without seeing the letter. I’d offered it, in fact that was the sole purpose I’d come in in the first place. They’d cut me short and told me to take a seat .. there was only one other person there sharing the wooden bench with me and she disappeared into the doctors surgery about 15 minutes after I’d arrived and had come out and said, good luck, another 15 minutes later. Awesome, I’d thought, this shouldn’t take too long.

An hour later, Miss Administration, had come out to me and said, its going to be at least another 2 hours before you can see the doctor, but you can’t see the doctor that you came to see. Hold on, says I, I just want to pass a letter on to him and then I’ll come back when its best for him. You can’t see that doctor, she said. I said, one of your colleagues told me to come here and I’d be able to get the letter to him. Well, she said, I’m not interested in what one of my colleagues said, I’m the administration, I make the decisions not my colleagues and its not an emergency .. now is it? Well not yet it isn’t I thought ..

3 hours later I’d been tagged but now it was becoming an emergency. Getting the letter to my doctor was no longer the immediate problem. Now, the immediate problem was these glossy posters. Because it’d become quite obvious that this Respect, this Duty of Care and Bullying and this having a ‘courageous conversation’ didn’t apply to me. These things were the stuff of dreams, the dreams of the administration side of the counter. They weren’t mutual, they were dependent on just which side of the glass one got to view the world from. There was another poster, it said, Aggressive Behaviour will not be tolerated – this most definitely only applied to those of us on the dirty side of the glass. I left .. before it did become an emergency.

“There is only one effective antidote for mental suffering and that is physical pain.” – Karl Marx.