Total degradation

I suspect that the stress imparted upon me by my chosen line of work is accelerating the deline of my body. I have a cold which seems to be stirring up my guts in a similar way to my previous bout of gastritis. This in itself is bad enough, but on Friday I took the day off from work and crashed out in bed for most of it. I must have slept in one of those weird illness-induced positions because when I woke up my neck and shoulders were tight to the point that my head felt like was going to pop off. This is an old neck injury caused by helping somone in a hostel move his stuff down three flights of stairs, around a-year-and-a-half ago.

I'm tempted to go and see a practitioner of alternative medicines instead of visiting yet another chinless, conveyor-belt quack. Perhaps some carefully placed needles? I may even, when I have the spare cash, pick up a Q-link.
Apparently these things contain a microchip which can be programmed with your body's health frequencies, which you then wear as a pendant to ward off Bad Vibes (mobile phone emissions, etc.) and promote low stress and healthiness in yourself. If they're good enough for use by elite military units and pro sporters, I might try one. Not cheap at £99 mind you...

Funny how it goes

Tonight was my last shift at the hostel. My last ever keyworking session there was with the fella I mentioned in October 4th's posting, "AAARRRRGGGHHHH!". I was fully intending to receive his tirade of paranoid ravings and then tell him to go away in no uncertain terms. However (as I generally suspected) I still found myself trying to reason with him.
And with the insight brought to me by the knowledge that I would never have to deal with him again, I found that I actually got some sense through. He only threatened to shoot everyone in Social Services twice, and I eventually got him to agree that it might not be a good thing to be viewed as a terrorist by the service providers that are trying to help him. I even got away with goading him about religion for a bit. I was tempted to play on a previous comment he made about all the staff being "children of satan"* for a laugh, but I left it.

Hopefully, now that I'll be working 9-to-5 hours I'll get something of a social life back and will be able to post about things other than hostel/new job (outreach worker) encounters. However, due to the current absence of a life...

There was a big metal acro-prop holding up part of the stairs in the hostel for the whole 18-odd months I worked there. It was taken away yesterday as it was found that the slight lean of the prop was pulling the banister away from the stairs, thus giving the bottom step nothing to rest on at one end. It was quite interesting/alarming to stand on the flight under those stairs and watch our heavier residents challenge the building's structural integrity.
Thinking about it, that would have been an interesting Darwin Award. "Hostel worker crushed by fat bloke and half a semi-derelict building".
What I was getting to with this part of the post was that whenever I leave a place, job, whatever, they immediately spend some money somewhere and improve things there. At uni they put phone lines and internet connections in the halls of residence just as we moved out. At the first hostel I worked at I was pissed off with the gaps in building security due to lack of enough cameras, and just after I left they got a new digital system which does it all. And in the other hostel there is now a distinct lack of metal pole to make nervous jokes about when visitors are shown around the building. The place looks vaguely normal.
Then again, it's possible that the staircase will collapse without the acro-prop and they will have to close the hostel down.
Or maybe nothing will happen at all and that bloke's paranoia has just been filtering into my subconscious. Only time will tell.

*My girlfriend helpfully pointed out that if you know your bible, Satan would only sire one offspring - the Anti-Christ. Of course I made this point during a keyworking debate, but he just wouldn't listen to me. Apparently I'm damned.

Oh, the fun I've had...

As I draw closer to moving on from the hostel and starting my new job, I've been reminiscing about my favourite moments there. One resident I have particularly fond memories of keeps springing to mind.

I keyworked him for around three months, and every time I saw him his pupils were like pin-pricks, he was sweating cobs and spouting nonsensical gibberish (a sure sign of opiate abuse. Or too much daytime TV). He would regularly come down to the office to phone his family/probation officer/dealer etc. Whether he had a hearing problem or was just a loaf-headed twat I'm not too sure, but he was constantly shouting "HUH?" into the phone.
He also had this habit of coming into the office and proudly showing me what he'd just shop-lifted. I was always having to point out that since I was his keyworker, and not one of his slack-arsed Chav mates, I would have to call the police and let them know about it. He seemed quite hurt by this, but it didn't stop him from showing me stuff. The police never came to the hostel to investigate because they were stop-searching him every other day anyway and couldn't handle the extra work load.

Eventually he was offered a flat. 30 doors from my own home... During the viewing of his prospective home a neighbour witnessed him shooting up on the doorstep of the property before the arrival of the housing officer, and then burgling the other neighbour's shed after the housing officer had departed. She reported him and the offer was withdrawn. The possiblity of having to advocate for him if he appealed the decision posed something of a dilemma. The situation resolved itself when, during a room search carried out by police, we discovered a fecking huge sack of drugs paraphernalia and evicted him.

Ah, happy days. I'll post more musings when they surface from my repressed memory.

Old Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times. Pay heed, Dataphage.

Back to Black

I chose the Minima Black template when I originally decided to do my own Blog. Then I looked at the title of my Blog and thought "people will think I've hit rock bottom. Make it look happier." I've now reversed that decision. "Trust your feelings Luke", etc. Also, the only other vaguely decent schemes are currently being used by Dataphage, Goat San, BY (who's modified his, the flash bastard), etc.
I like the high contrast stuff. I have waning eyesight as well as thinning hair (dataphage...) and I find the white on black thing easier on my squint.

I am still no closer to working out this HTML bollocks. I have neither the time or patience to keep re-writing bits of it and then preview my work to find that it has done absolutely nothing. I will either ask a small child to do it for me and then hide in shame (or eat the child to hide the evidence), or set dataphage up as an administrator and then sit back and watch him bastardise my Blog and fill it with pornography links.

Suggestion to Goat San - without being excessively crude, I'd be interested to hear about experiences of Japanese filth. I've heard about the vending machines dispensing used female underwear, and disposable hand-shandy devices for men to use on the tube, but I'm not sure how much of what I hear is kah-kah. I find it interesting that such a polite, charming ordered society could be quite so horn-ridden (see Goat San's Blog about the festival involving massive cocks...)

Japanese carpenters are famed for their skill. They spend sometimes a third of their day sharpening and polishing their tools (fnar) as a form of meditation and focus. This has allowed them to create wooden palaces using no nails - the joins they make in the wood are sufficient to hold the building together in an earthquake.
I have tried to bear these facts in mind whilst trying to respray my airsoft rifle from a dodgy urban grey to a nice shiny black. However, the number of times this week I have found myself staring at a thumb print in the drying paint, or a bit of clag that has stuck to the underside when I've put the thing down... "AAARRRGGGHH! BASTARD!" and all the other ususal DIY curses. How do the orientals do it? Surely somewhere in Japan there's at least one bloke who, whenever he tries to do anything around the house, destroys it through lack of patience and then disturbs the neighbours with his wailing?
Bula's DIY tip for the month: When rewiring the electrics in your home, don't have you phone in a belt pouch set on vibrate...

AAARRRRGGGHHHH!

I am not really at liberty to discuss too much due to client confidentiality and suchlike. However, I am so completely frustrated by the situation I find myself in that I feel I should share it with others to gain some sort of foothold on sanity via their comments...

I am currently keyworking a man who cannot, for a variety of reasons, see that he is ever in the wrong about anything. Ok, there are many people we know like this - uncle roy; the bloke who preaches at people very loudly from the middle of Broadmead; you when you're drunk, etc. But this guy is disagreeing with the opinions of a whole variety of health and housing professionals, on the basis of a handful of YTS certificates that apparently make him qualified up to world leader status. Oh, and if you should directly call his actions or words into question he'll take you to court (or at least threaten to. Repeatedly).
Part of my current job is to sit with this man for an hour per week and discuss issues which relate to his re-housing. When he turns up and goes on about how everyone is against him, and it could lead to his untimely demise, and he wants all their names so he knows who to blame, well... It's reached the point where I feel like saying "You know what? I'm not surprised everyone is against you. Where do I sign up?"

He has been passed from organisation to organisation. We all phone each other to discuss issues and when his name is mentioned we all go "oh, him (sigh/chuckle)". Nobody knows how to handle him or what to do with him. And now I have him.
I have tried reason. It hasn't worked. I have tried confronting him with various harsh realities. No joy there. I'm on the verge of not making any keyworking appointments for him at all until I move jobs. Lots of suffering and an increasing shortfall in the compassion department. I have until the 21st when I move jobs to try and work out a solution or come to terms with dumping him on someone else. *shrug*

In a semi-related item, I bought a new airsoft rifle last weekend. The stress relief gained by running around an airsofting site shooting a lot of other gun-toting psychos is not to be underestimated. My arsenal is now quite large (7 items) and I plan to by around 5 more while I can - before the Government push through the Violent Crime Reduction bill and stop anyone from buying any more. Rather than me start spouting vitriol about how the nanny state is persecuting upstanding responsible citizens and failing to make laws that are already in place work to stop Chavs from using replica weapons to terrorise shopping centers (ah, too late), take a look at www.saveairsoft.org
I would gladly submit to registration, etc. But it looks like they're just set on knackering the whole thing. Bah.