My new (temporary) job

I’ve managed to come by a rather sweet temporary job with the local facilities for dealing with the learning disabled, which consists of (who’d have guessed!) driving them around. It basically involves driving them from their homes (which are normally care homes) to their day care facilities in the morning and back in the evening, and taking a group out in the late morning. I got it through an agency I re-activated my links with a couple of weeks back, after my usual agency (in Croydon) had failed to get me any work for a couple of weeks (leaving me badly short of cash).

This is certainly an unusual job for me; my normal jobs involve goods, not people. A few years ago I was working for a commercial transit company on contract to Surrey County Council. For a length of time I can’t remember now, I picked up severely learning-disabled children from various places in Surrey and took them to their schools around Leatherhead. Then there was some event which necessitated me picking up a group of kids with behavioural issues. On the second day, I told one of them to shut up when they were being too loud in the back of the van. The care worker told the company, and I was out of work that day. And this was after weeks of dealing with the severely disabled and there being no complaints at all.

The people here all fall into the “severely disabled” category. Many of them walk and talk, to varying degrees. A lot don’t. They range in age from late teens to the younger end of elderly; they get sent to this department after finishing with the education system. I always go out with an escort (who used to be a driver, until he was stripped of his licence for reasons connected with his diabetes), and asked him how the “clients” or “service users” became the way they are. He told me that many of them had Down’s Syndrome, and some were the victims of forceps deliveries that went wrong. Not many were disabled by accident. But a lot of them were middle-aged, and lived at home until their parents became too old to cope. The wise ones, he said, got their children used to living in residential care early, so it wouldn’t be too much of a shock when they had to move in for good.

I have to say, this job reminds me of why I wouldn’t like to work with the mentally disabled all the time. A few of them inspire sympathy and/or respect, like Janice, who is in her 40s, and has a calm and dignified air to her even though she cannot talk (she is in a wheelchair and can tread herself round in it), while others shout around her. She has said to have been a “service user” of this department since her early 30s. I enjoy being around her even though she cannot really do much. Others I find frustrating or even a bit frightening. Sometimes I’m looking for a patient (I can’t get to calling them clients) in the unit, and I get some patient who isn’t supervised asking me a question which I can’t really understand. I gather she wants to know about who’s driving her (or someone else) around this week or next. She’s very nicely dressed, in a long denim skirt with flowers on it, and I’ve been told that she lives with her family who look after her very well.

The centre is basically a sheltered workshop combined with a treatment and activity centre, and the more able of them do craft work, the fruits of which they sell at the May Fair to raise money for the centre’s outings. Some of them sit and listen to music and perhaps dance, while others have been known to make clothes. I saw a rather nice picture of various clients with the clothes they’d made, and the ladies tended to make rather nice, brightly coloured dresses. I asked the escort about one of the patients, who attended the centre in a bright purple velvet-effect dress, and he told me that several of the patients liked to dress up, that they had feelings just like any other adults, and many of them in fact had partners among the other patients.

I think I’m going to enjoy this job for the next week or two – it’s nice to work with people rather than goods and on your own every so often. They are much better to work with than most of the driver’s mates or construction site workers I’ve had to deal with on other jobs. But the work is still not a full eight hours’ work, and I’m not sure if it’ll be eight hours’ pay either. I’ll have to see, insha Allah, when I get my pay slip next Friday.