I finished working for the Department of Social Security in May 1994, after some months of stress, and was granted a Disability Support Pension in August of that year. My job at the department was stressful enough without what happened on the day that began the end of my career.
For instance, we were always being changed around from one job to another, and lost a lot of time moving our personal cupboards around the office from workstation to workstation, but it was easier than moving our files and personal effects from one cupboard to another. We often didn't know when we arrived for work in the morning where we would be working that day.
Along with this uncertainty was the fact that, unless we were 'gazetted' to a particular job, we had to keep re-applying for our own jobs. It's complicated, so don't ask! Add 'multi-skilling' to this, and conditions were very far from ideal. Multi-skilling was having to learn about the other benefit areas. For instance, I was in the Family Allowances section, and I was expected to learn all about Pensions too.
It didn't help that Head Office in Canberra kept making changes to all the benefits, so that we were expected to know, not only what the current rules are, but also what they used to be through various changes, so that we could explain those changes to clients. Sometimes I felt like my head was going to explode with all the things I was expected to remember. Also, we were thrown into higher positions without being told a bloody thing about what we were supposed to do.
Once, a supervisor bawled me out for not doing something that I hadn't been told I should do. On my first day on the counter in the Family Allowances section, I naturally thought that I should not leave the counter unattended, but he told me that I should have taken some forms that had been handed in, photocopied them and stamped the photocopies 'Original sighted and returned'. Of course, I never heard the supervisor say, 'Sorry, I should have told you.'
This was the same supervisor who dealt with an appeal by a client on a decision made by me. I had felt that the client was being treated most unfairly by the system, but had to apply the rules, and refuse her Child Care Fee Relief. My supervisor told her that I had been wrong, and that her payment would be granted.
However, when I took the problem to the section manager, and the issue was investigated, it was discovered that my decision had been correct in the first place. My supervisor then demanded that I ring the client and tell her his decision had been wrong. Fortunately my section manager backed me up when I refused to do this, and the supervisor was told to do his own grovelling to the client.
The supervisor didn't like me much after that, and though he spent much time outside on the roof smoking, and chatting privately on the phone, he once told me off for accepting a short phone call from my son, whom I rarely saw, as he was in the Army.
One day he set me to deal with a backlog of Child Care Fee Relief claim forms. These claims involved a lot of checking, so it was a time-consuming job. After a day or so slogging away at the forms, he told me off for checking them properly and told me to just put them through without checking. This instruction could have led to incorrect decisions being made, so I questioned his orders, and again had to be backed up by the section manager.
Since then I have thought that maybe he was setting me up for trouble by that order. I frequently ended up in tears over his treatment of me, so was already fragile when the axe fell.
All in all, it was very stressful working there. Add abusive clients to this, and it should come as no surprise that more sick leave was taken in that department than in the Tax Office, and all due to stress. We were never allowed to respond to this abuse, always having to remain polite. The worst we ever got away with was to hang up the phone on somebody who was treating us as less than dirt, saying, 'Whoops, I just lost her!'
Luckily most of our section managers recognised our need for this relief, and would back us to the hilt, as long as we didn't return the abuse, the biggest no-no at the department, contrary to the lies that are told by the general public about what departmental officers are supposed to have said.
The abuse wasn't all verbal, as many counter officers learned. One bloke who had been refused a payment for some reason or other, came back to the Fremantle office with a baseball bat, and managed to do thousands of dollars worth of damage to computers and equipment in the counter area before he could be stopped. One creep told young Jodie that he would be waiting outside the office when she finished work and was going to shoot her. She wasn't shot, but though it would have shocked us, it wouldn't have surprised us.
Let's face it, there are some sick bastards out there. At one office, they had to install bollards in front of the main door after somebody deliberately rammed his car into it in revenge for not getting a payment. Even then, we were luckier than some offices in the Eastern States, which we heard had to have armed guards patrolling the counter area of their offices.
The abuse was not confined to the office, because many people, as soon as they found out I worked at Social Security, would start to complain about how we were always stuffing their payments up, and they would tell lies about how the staff at Social Security talked to them.
This happened to many of us, and of course we didn't treat these oafs with the politeness we were forced to give them at the office! Many a pleasant evening out would be spoiled by one of us telling the troublemaker what we thought of her or him: 'Giving you a pension to keep you alive is a waste of money!'
One cretin even told me she planned to anonymously send an envelope full of cockroaches to her local office. I did notify the office in writing so that when that happened they would know who was responsible, though as I never heard about that happening, I guess she realised that I'd tell them about her threat, and changed her mind.
My neighbours, most of which were on some kind of benefit, wouldn't trust me, so I spent many lonely evenings in my flat, never invited in for a coffee or a chat. They passed the word around, 'Watch what you say to her, she works for Social Security!' Too late, I found out that many people in the department would lie about where they worked to avoid these kinds of problems.
On the particular day that really started my problem, I had been doing higher duties (for the first time and with no training) as the ASO4 officer out at the counter, and was in charge of a couple of young girls at reception.
A woman, very stocky and butch with short dyed blond hair, started raising her voice at one of the girls, Rachel. I heard Rachel telling the woman that she needed to be in the pensions section upstairs, and that she couldn't help her, as this was the family allowance section.
The woman wouldn't listen to Rachel, so I went over, and explained to the woman that Rachel didn't know anything about pensions, as this was the Family Payments section, and that she would have to go upstairs to people who could help her properly.
We later found out that she was Maureen somebody, who had just moved interstate from Adelaide, and was wanting to know why she hadn't got her pension. She hadn't notified anyone of her change of address, so her pension had been suspended as a means of getting in touch with her. This was standard practice, and a very practical approach, otherwise payments might continue to be paid out to somebody who had died, remarried or left the country or whatever.
Anyway, she violently objected to her pension being stopped, though under normal circumstances it is immediately re-instated as soon as the person lets the Social Security know they are still alive. She refused to go upstairs, insisting that we gave her the money right now, impossible, as no cash was kept on the premises. She became totally unreasonable, and decided I would make a good target for her abuse.
She noticed that I wasn't wearing a wedding ring, so she began chanting, 'You'll never get a man to fuck you!', over and over and over again, in the crowded counter area..
I tried the back office for backup, only to find that all section managers, plus the office manager were all out of the office at a conference. So, I was IT! And it was my first day as an acting ASO4. I should sue them for leaving a totally inexperienced person in such a position! So there I was, with this woman chanting obscenities across the counter at me, with all the queues of people at the reception counters in the Family Payments and Jobsearch areas watching the whole performance.
I was about to call the police for help, when somebody from another section came out from the back office. She eventually managed to get the woman to calm down, and took her upstairs in the lift to the pensions department, where she threw a chair across the counter at Martin, a most inoffensive bloke. The chair was metal, but she broke it! The police were eventually called, but by the time they arrived, she had disappeared.
I filled in an abuse report, (would you believe there was so much abuse that we had special forms for this!) and we checked on the computer, and found that she'd had a previous report made out against her in South Australia. I was feeling very frazzled, so someone suggested I go for an early lunch, which I did.
I went to a nearby coffee bar, but before I could decide what to get for lunch, I started getting the feeling that someone was watching me. I thought it was that woman, and I got scared, and started to head back to the office. I started to feel panicky, and I couldn't breathe properly. I was crying, feeling like everyone was looking at me, and I was shoving people out of the way, in desperate need to get back to the relative safety of the office. By the way, I didn't actually see the woman out on the street, but it didn't matter. The damage was done.
I got back to the office feeling terrified at how I was feeling, not knowing why I couldn't breathe. The first person I ran into was the social officer, Laura Cassidy, who made me sit down with a glass of water. She told me I was having a panic attack, and that it was a normal reaction to what had happened at the counter. I'd never even heard of panic attacks before, no wonder I was scared witless at what was happening.
Eventually, I was sent home and told to come back after the weekend. I did, but things were never the same after that. I never saw the woman again, but the damage was already done. I'd have to leave work during the day because I'd be in tears over nothing, so I was sent to see Graham Taylor, a psychologist, who gave me a few sessions, and decided I was probably OK. The Government paid for these sessions, along with the medication I needed to be able to sleep at night.
I had a change then, and went to work in another office in the same department for a few months, at the Teleservice Centre, with no physical contact with clients, just telephone contact. There, we were right in the front line for abuse, but as it was on the phone, there was no immediate feeling of danger, so working there was a pleasant change, for a while at least.
However, one day, I was subjected to particularly irrational abuse on the phone, and it triggered off another panic attack. My section manager, Irene Oram, put me in touch with the staff welfare officer, Katherine Cheng, who counselled me over the phone, as she worked in Head Office in Perth (Bullshit Palace, as we called it). I don't mind admitting that without Katherine's help, I would have gone to pieces much earlier than I did.
During the course of these talks, my stint at the Teleservice Centre was up, and I had to return to the Fremantle office.
Katherine, who I eventually met in person some months later, and who became a very dear friend, talked a lot with me over the phone, and among the solutions she suggested to my problem was a transfer to another Government Department, where I wouldn't have any contact with the public. This would have been the ideal situation, but unfortunately, all the departments I contacted were in the process of trying to download staff, rather than take on more, so that idea didn't work.
Meanwhile, my days at work were becoming shorter, as my crying fits began earlier each day, and when eventually I began crying even before the morning tea break, I knew the end had come. I told my section manager, Ian Randall, known to us all as Rambo, that I was going to quit. He convinced me to take a couple more days off sick and think it over, but on the following Monday in May 1994 I put my written notice on his desk. Incredibly, nobody suggested that I should go back to see Dr Taylor, and by then I was too far gone to think about that.
Knowing there was an end to it buoyed me up for a couple of days, but on about the third or fourth day, I was unable to even enter the building to get to work, and spent the rest of my notice on sick leave.
Despite having got out of the stressful work situation, my troubles didn't end there.
I applied for Unemployment Benefits, but was advised to try for Sickness Benefit, which was granted, though after a couple of months filling out forms, my doctor told me to apply for the Disability Support Pension. As I had arthritis, diabetes and a bad ankle, along with the stress, he felt there would be no problem getting on the pension. He was right. I even had a panic attack during the medical exam that was being conducted by the Commonwealth Medical Officer, so the pension was granted immediately. I think that this panic attack in this case was brought on by all the interviews for benefits being carried out in the same building that I had been working at.
For months afterwards I was still getting panic attacks, which would always come unexpectedly, with no apparent trigger. The worst of these came while I was standing at the counter of a butcher's shop in Bullcreek shopping centre, waiting for change, feeling quite content with life, when all of a sudden I couldn't breathe, and had to get out into the fresh air. I left my change and ran sobbing for the car park. I could never go back for my change, and I could never remember how much it was either!
These attacks grew fewer and more manageable in time, and after about 2 or 3 years they stopped happening regularly, and only popped out to say 'Boo!' once in a while, for no apparent reason.
What didn't stop at all was the inability to talk about why I left the Social Security. After a time, I was able to think about it without ending up in tears, and I learned to block it all from my thoughts. However, I still don't want to talk about it to anyone, because when I try, I end up in tears. I know I could talk about it to Katherine, but as she is now my friend, I won't abuse our friendship. I have managed to talk about it to my good friends June and Cathy, who let me cry on their shoulders, and to Beryl, who told me that as I still can't talk about it without getting very upset, 6 years after these events took place, there is still a lot of unresolved hurt that has to be dealt with.
I thought I would be alright typing this out, and hoped it might provide some kind of catharsis, but I don't know. I have used half a box of tissues in the process, and don't feel any better, just totally drained.
A valuable lesson I learned from this whole sorry mess is that no job is worth hanging onto if you're being abused.
About 3 or 4 years ago, I did volunteer work at an op shop, but when I tried to pass on valid customer complaints to the boss (a church pastor!) he yelled, 'I'm not interested!' at me in front of the customers. I went home and wrote out a letter telling him what I thought of a so-called Christian minister behaving in such a manner. I also told him that I was resigning on the spot. I didn't let things even start to get really bad, and felt so much better writing the letter and getting it off my chest, that there was very little stress at all involved. Even better, word got around, and I heard that he lost many customers through his tantrum! If only I could have felt that good about resigning from the Social Security!
Six years on: It is now the year 2008, and my depressed state, dormant for some time now, erupts again every few years, and I am usually being treated for clinical depression. During these bouts, I am unable to visit my writers group, where I am now President, or the leisure club , in fact for a couple of months I was unable to leave the house for fear of crying. One Wednesday I tried to go out to collect my That's Life! and Take 5 magazines, but the thought of going out into the world brought on such a bad panic attack that it was Saturday before I could go out and get them.
A friend prescribed flower essences, as a backup for the Zoloft tablets I have to take, and things started moving in the right direction. I can now sleep properly at night, something which has been denied me for months at a time, so that I no longer feel tired all the time. Also, I can now go out and do my essential shopping, though it usually takes a while after each episode before I can go shopping for anything other than food, or to socialise with my friends at the club. They are very supportive and keep in contact by phone or with short visits, and it's great to be able to return to the activities and outings with them that I have enjoyed so much over the past few years.
My message is this: Please, please think twice before you abuse the girl on the counter at the Social Security (now Centrelink), you can't know what stresses she is going through. You could be providing the last straw that ruins somebody's life.

© Sandy Parkinson June, 2000