Family and Communith Services, Wyong. Inspection team
I remember struggling to explain this back when I was about sixteen years of age. It didnt make any sense and my reaction was a visceral fight against abuse rather than an intellectual one. The best I could come up with at that time was a theory I called Dots and Crosses. It is a theory of hidden bigotry and how a person could have their life ruined by events that seemed absolutely normal until you understood.
Most of us go through life without having to dot every i or cross every t. The community doesn’t require it. It isnt necessary and only makes everything difficult. If you enter a low or no-security place on a regular basis the guard will often just wave you through after the first few times. There is no need to spend a lot of time checking identification where the site has no need for it. If you have become a person of interest or the target of bigotry you will not only find your identification checked you will have to explain every reference in the document regularly. This kind of excessive zeal is applied to everything and because most people just want to be reassured that everything is fine with as little effort as possible your attempts to get help will be met by people justifying the fact that the system has to do what it has to do. The people within the system simply say the rules say they should do whatever it is they are excessively applying to you.
“Work to Rule” is union slang for a job that stops dead in its tracks. The rules have levels of application that are not required for day to day functions and actually create more work and frustration and wasted time as the effort put into getting through the job are instead placed on the minutiae of documentation and rigmarole. It is how a bigot hides their unwanted need to act against some person. Suddenly every answer has to be on the line and fully written out in black pen. Papers that nobody has to bother about become important and cannot be ignored. Rules that most people have never heard of are invoked with urgency. A matter of a loud and unhappy customer suddenly requires police presence instead of just clear answers and a cup of tea.
The Inspection happened on Monday the 5th June. Eight days ago. They brought some witness and two police and they left buzzing with rage at being unable to play whatever nasty little twist they had in mind in the face of multiple surveillance cameras and a witness and a security guard of my own.
Then the week ended with a public holiday weekend the next Monday.
On the Tuesday the 13th, during the night, it transpired there were four letters from Family and Community Services soaking in the miserable little mail hole they supply with the apartment. Four! Three of them were never to be read because that week and most of the weekend it rained and the mail hole was full of water and snail and slugs. They were soaked and then chewed until they were too badly damaged to even be laid out and dried. I sent an email to the Wyong office of FACS but via their generic office so they wouldn’t deny it had arrived as they have done before. The email asked that their letters be re-issued.
The letter which could be read explained why they had stood me up on the 18th of May. They didn’t turn up after weeks of insisting it was absolutely essential they inspect the apartment. They didn’t feel a need to notify me.
The letter explained that they didn’t turn up because I had threatened them.
As a reply I sent them them a long email beginning with a request that they provide the nature and specific details of the threat. I included the fact I remember this and what had been said was that I was seeing a lawyer with regard to researching their addresses at home and sending them sales people and other documents and also to continue the good work they had started of sending people around to ask if I was alright. The difference being I would be the one to send them to the FACS workers. I care.
I then added short information bursts about Complex PTSD and why the things they were doing were on the same side of evil as child abuse. After that there was another information bubble about Frontal Lobe Injury and the way it changed behavior and left a person vulnerable to emotional outrages, memory loss, loss of inhibition and unsuitable reactions without the person actually knowing it at the time. I know they know I have this. That is why they stir as hard as they can and then call the police. They hope I will fail to control the mood swings and outrage and they can refer to me as a bad or dangerous tenant and put me on the street. That is the dark reality behind their “innocent” invasions. Spiteful malignance that can lead to police intervention then homelessness and for me a very unpleasant death. It looms large behind every exchange of mail and every demand to inspect