Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Dealing with situations

This week I've been dealing with a couple of things that are not easy for someone like me to do and can have a bad effect on me emotionally and behaviourally.
Like most people I have a checking account with a Bank which is typically used for things such as my disability income replacement and care needs payments (Dla) to be paid into since for the majority of people payment by Government cheques redeemable at Post Offices or transferable to bank accounts stopped a good number of years back and equally I use to pay for things such things I buy, my PayPal tm transactions and rail tickets and to draw out paper bank notes.
To cut a long story short, here in the UK, banks have been trying to get out of owning branches, encouraging people to move to mobile or online banking and paperless billing and I recently received a letter saying unless I told them otherwise, I would no longer be getting monthly paper statements from August and they would be done quarterly.
Now while you can telephone the bank where it can tell you your transaction details, I don't always understand what is said and between hearing it and say trying to write it down , I totally forget what was said and while I can see a monitor online, my dyslexia is such words and figure go all over the place while so I normally use colour transparencies and a rule to filter  on paper this doesn't work on a monitor and I'd end up having print everything off.
I get very anxious telephoning people, never feeling I've understood them  and what we agreed especially if needs me to read information cos I struggle with that so I wasn't looking forward to it which wasn't helped by a good seven minutes wait.
Anyway I get through to a customer advisor in Glasgow and having supplied my ID details, explain to him a bit about my disabilities around talking and using the bank before explaining my call is about monthly statements and I'd like to keep them. We do a quick ID to confirm the account and with his support, reassuring me throughout I managed to do this by myself.
The other thing was that 'Form' - the Employment and Support Allowance Work Capability Assessment from April and I had a brown envelope from the Government department  that makes decisions and sends the payments electronically  in yesterday's mail in a badly worded three sheet letter.
It tells me they have looked again (not using the word 'reviewed') at my claim due to a 'change' (not saying what 'change' it is) outlining what I should get , what to if wish to appeal the decision and that I'm judged to be in the group for people who are unlike to transition back into work anytime soon.
Without expressly saying it, given nothing else had changed I'm reasonably sure this is the decision looked at with medical information from my doctor by the assessment people and the department as it was dated last Tuesday and followed a statement by them of my total payments for the last tax year I had last week.
I'm cautiously optimistic this is the last say for a good while about that benefit which leaves me feeling a lot more relieved.

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