Rare piece of insurance common sense

Travel Guard, answering a travel insurance enquiry for a company their claims line serves, said something worth hearing concerning a topic that no travel insurance policy is satisfactory on: lost or stolen travel documents including passports. To my enquiry as to what happens if you can't get a written police report, they say you can now give them a note explaining the circumstances that you could not get one.

The rule they always have in travel insurance, that you must obtain a written report to base your claim on, conflicts with the whole nature of travel risk. How can they possibly know that the police or other officials will be willing to provide the written report? What if they won't, and in a foreign country, how are you supposed to make them? Even in a European democracy, let alone in totally corrupt countries?

To a common sense enquiry as a buyer, for once I have got a better answer than I expected to get. It is some progress on the issue that concerns me so intensely, of losable travel documents and your safety when having to use them: particularly for spectrumites because of dexterity issues dyspraxia and attention deficit that make small objects easier to lose. Of course, given the complex trickiness of insurance and all the unpredictable details of a loss situation that you can not know what they will be until it happens, the value of this consumer victory remains small compared to the safety need that folks' safety when travelling should not depend on carried physical documents at all, and the safety victory if this 200 year old practice that big business interests have habituated our culture to accept was actually stopped.

Maurice Frank

Covering ground

It matters to be an independent group that runs itself, not tied to any council funding nor run by the big charities. It matters because to be a genuine voice in what you say. But there is a very clear top reason why it matters, which Elas is living now. It means we are free to have no territorial boundary.

Elas has been the core of making a string of successful meet-ups happen all round the Central Belt, as recently at Perth and Paisley. In them we have put face to face reality to personal links made beyond our own region, in 2 ways.

• So that aspies within reach of us have joined us, who have no similarly independent group running in their localities: our filling of that void has been right and made a needed practical difference in several cases.
• Or, so that folks in those places where a new venture can start up cautiously, that is independent like us, can use us as a reference point and a friendly link to meet up with and share with. Supporting the free aspie scene to take root in new ground.

We can do this because nobody's office is in a controlling place to tell us to only serve folks inside a defined boundary line. Number 6 and its Glasgow counterpart the Arc have not been allowed to succeed in the same way, as what would be a good part of their service. By their state funding to serve particular councils or health regions, they have been tied into functioning only inside territorial boundaries. Of NHS Lothian's region, or of the terribly arbitrary Glasgow city boundary that is smaller than the physically real city and is often just flung between 2 houses in long streets of unbroken habitation, causing division and exclusion and pain as we have heard when visiting the West. The autism strategy is now to extend Number 6 type services to everywhere, but presumably they will still each be little islands whose users are separated from each other by boundary lines. It still won't be a cross-regional scene for folks in places of well developed service to help out folks in places of rudimentary service. But aspies organised independently to meet up can be that.

Now we hear of a new group in Stirling with the council paying Scottish Autism to run it. This arrangement again ties it to only serve the territorial boundary of Stirling, We have seen this result in exclusion from that local scene, in time of need, be experienced when resident in an adjoining council area, clearly inside the radius of having Stirling as a focal place. Incredibly ironic of SA to accept deals like this to run groups, when its own head office is in Alloa, one of the places this group is barred from serving.

In common sense care for the participants, SA should want this arrangement to be as temporary as possible. The folks in Stirling need their group to evolve to the model of running independently same as us, and as Argh in the Highlands. So that it can include folks' friends in Alloa and all the places around there regardless of what council they are in, and so it can make the same non-local links as us, maybe including with us, and be part of the growth of a speaking out scene that covers everywhere. Local groups don't need funding to exist, members just need to agree a place to meet up that does not involve expensive room booking and they are all comfortable with. Local groups by contact and meet-ups, and by folks crossing region to belong to whichever group they feel best in, helping each other to make the scene cover everywhere, is the vision. We are already starting to make this happen. It also protects our freedom everywhere to speak on problems with services and to have blogs like this, when what we want to say goes well beyond what the big charities want to say.

Remember another way these links massively importantly protect our free voice, and indeed our personal links and friendships. By our links with each other in different places we will all safeguard each other against getting trapped by any authoritarian takeover in any group, like the cautionary horror story of what happened to a group in a region adjoining us, that was run by a bigger society whose committee suddenly passed Orwellian cult-like rules misusing data protection to ban members from speaking freely to each other, before they had even had the chance to consent to this being put in place, so that it interfered in communication between friends and cut folks off from each other. A sinister story I told here a year ago, it is time to remind ourselves of it. In fact the group concerned has remained suspended from meeting ever since then, supposedly temporarily, which is now a farce. It is a clearly failed and destructive outcome to how to run a group. Compare that with the success of the total opposite model, the free model, ours.

The folks who were in that group, now unjustly adrift without an aspie scene, or who have been in any type of controlled group, have a need to find the scene all over again, but our free scene of independent groups that all support each other's members in keeping it the free scene.

Maurice Frank

physical document stolen, no holiday, and listening to us could have prevented it

In today's Metro I was overjoyed to find that someone else, not me, had written in supporting the view favoured by me and the education reformer John Holt, that there should be no age limit on the vote at all. That everyone can start voting when they personally feel ready. You see, whenever you are oppressed, there is always someone somewhere who sensibly realises it.

But never in this world does pleasure last, before pain takes it all away again. The same Metro also told of a couple who got burgled during their wedding, and the man's passport was stolen. Despite the personalised nature of passports the burglars obviously reckoned they could do some fraudulent changing of it, and nicked it, with the result that the couple can't go on their honeymoon to Iceland.

Think about that. They are no longer allowed to do something they have presumably already booked and paid to do, because by no fault of their own a physical object has been stolen from them. For being victims of crime, victims of theft, they personally cease to be allowed to do a thing.

Then remember what I have said here several times before, about how the fine coordination and dyspraxia and attention issues in autistic spectrum conditions increases the losability of small objects like tickets, so makes it disability discrimination for your status as you move around ever to depend on your possession of any small physical object like a ticket. Like a passport too. It is a form of ticket, and it is barbarously primitive to have its losability during your holiday to be able to get you into a frightening practical crisis. Very visibly it is a form of apartheid pass book too.

There is a disability equality duty to listen to all the impacts made by any disability. If there had been no blatant evading of the responsibility to listen to the autism scene concerning this, then the issue of losable documents would already have been forced, including at a brilliantly democratising international level because passports exist. If this had been done uncorruptly, following the medical facts as far as they go, then passports would no longer exist and this couple's experience could not have happened.

Maurice Frank

Getting your classic Yahoo mail back

Anyone who has the "upgrade" version of Yahoo email and has found it total rubbish, here is a way to change it back. The upgrade version is full of difficulties the old did not have, you can't backspace or else you just have to put your password back in, and you can't delete drafts without getting a crazy message "one of the drafts you are trying to delete is open. Please close it " - and what the hell do open and closed mean? There is no explanation of that from Yahoo.

Go here: help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/ymail/context/migrationv2.html

When the page opens---scroll down about midway until you see this---"What if I don't want to upgrade to the newest version of Yahoo! Mail"?----If you do not want to upgrade, please "click here" to use Yahoo! Mail Classic.
("click here" is a blue link). Return to Classic is immediate and permanent.

This came from here answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=AgLeOawNBx_FJd7AqN2xgXcD.Bd.;_ylv=3?qid=20120113110800AAOha2E fantastic how many folks will be grateful for this answer. As written there, the New "Improved'' (sic) Mail is very buggy, unstable & a total pain in the butt. There are literally thousands & thousands of users complaining they can't use their mail like they used to.

stressing me

In the news today a compensation award for stress for a teacher who suffered a ridiculous workload. Resulting in a radio Scotland phone-in this morning on teachers' work conditions and stress. I failed to get mentioned on it that the media has regularly shown interest in overstressing of teachers and none at all in overstressing of their students. Never have I heard a phone-in on that.

It's now hitting 30 years since I was overwhelmed by a ridiculous workload at school, and I never got any chance to seek a compensation award through any industrial injury type of route. Employees get that, school students don't. The system assumes their abilities can be decided for them, and they are not free to walk out of the situation if it becomes impossible as it did for me. It is a lot harder and riskier a prospect for the mishandled school student who has left school with consequently no prospects, to simply sue, and besides, crises at school bring in the teenage mental health systems, who themselves can take sharply against you if you resist getting bossed around by them just as badly as by your school. The student becomes a mental health issue, with all that means for civil status, because of their teachers' actions which are not the student's fault. Then they are not going to be supportive witnesses for you, instead their attitude that you are mental unless you change yourself to fit in with all their ideals makes any suing impossible.

The emergence of aspies has been the life miracle I needed delivering into my hands proof that aspie skills at some limited types of fact retention had been the real explanation of the personal strengths that made my teachers recklessly greedy. Never was proving this point helped by the media recognising student stress as any sort of major issue. Now, we in the aspie scene know that student stress has been a recurring aspie experience from constant misreading of us by educators. The trusting public who believe reality is everything the tabloids and BBC say it is, still have no knowledge of this at all. They still only hear of the teachers suffering.

Maurice Frank

For our convenience ?

Further to March 21 post "no loo Inverness to Edinburgh".

Perhaps randomly by the right person being in the office, I got a reply to another incident of the stopping Citylinks failing to observe the Forth road bridge stop, which are not always answered at all and has been a recurrent problem ever since the present road layout was put in after the tolls were abolished. Getting an answer to this, I combined a response to it with asking again after the Inverness loo incident and how it had never been answered. So 8 months after it happened, I have extracted these thoughts from Citylink:

"Our coaches are equipped with on-board toilet facilities, however on the occasion where these are not functioning or an alterative vehicle without toilet facilities is used, the driver should make toilet stops for passengers. I am very sorry that on this occasion the driver did not make a toilet stop en route, however please note that he/she may not have known to do so unless a request was made by a passenger." and "If there are no toilet facilities or they are not functioning properly, the driver will make stops at the request of passengers. If you are not comfortable asking the driver to stop during the journey, then you can explain when boarding that you may need a toilet stop and the driver should schedule a stop en route."

Still none of this announced routinely to passengers: you have to suffer and complain and chase up a missing answer before you get this.

Perhaps at the time the blog post here made them decide it was scarier to answer than not, because the absence of a toilet at Broxden was clearly going to be indefensible in any answer they could give. "I can advise you that there are now toilet facilities at Perth Broxden, which were installed in April." Of course that's after we were there, and knowing that facility did not yet exist on the day we were there, they let that driver drive for 3 1/2 hours without any routine instruction to stop.

The present position is still unsatisfactory. They are sticking to making you make a request to the driver. That means you have to realise the situation as soon as you get on, and that is when he is busy checking everyone else on and loading the baggage. To make a request during the journey you have to distract the driver when on a fast road, which may be dangerous or not allowed, and it may be ages before he has any cause to stop. Has customer services thought of that? You have to know a good time to make the request, when travelling through remote country. Those are too much logical burdens to leave to passengers. The only way I can see it being safe to use these long distance services, is if I carry a printed copy of their email with me, so that if landed with a no toilet bus I can show the driver there is an instruction from a higher level to make a stop. You could carry a printed copy of this posting.

Maurice Frank

tickety boo

Sailing Calmac's ferries in the Western Isles has become safer since I did an island hopping holiday back in 1992. Then, they collected your ticket only at the sailing's end. Anyone could get on but it committed you to still have this losable small object in your possession, not lost or stolen, at destination. Exactly what would happen to you carried fear through uncertainty. During that holiday I did indeed come across a case, an old lady in a disembarking queue in front of me had lost her ticket during the journey and was trying to cope by cracking jokes about going to jail. But this is a humanly sick situation against all practical common sense. What if she had been robbed, and she the victim had to talk of going to jail? I last saw her standing to 1 side with the ticket man, no idea what happened, I just wonder if the same would have happened to a teenager as to an old lady, both equally innocent.

I remember the system making me anxious all that holiday, and not being attracted to the Western Isles again for a long time. That old system is now gone, and that is some welcome progress, for Elas's recent visit to Mull and Iona. Now they do the tickets at boarding, less scary. But it would still seriously foul up your life to lose a ticket in those remote small port villages with scant buses or emergency facilities. It remains an example of how dangerous tickets are as a system, and have been for 200 years, and how the danger discriminates against anyone with a condition increasing their likelihood to lose small objects. Which is my case for banning tickets.

Duart castle, on Mull, is using a ticket system with echoes of Calmac's old one, for its private buses that meet the ferries at Craignure. If you get on without a prebooking, the driver gives you a ticket that you only pay for when you reach the castle entrance kiosk, along with your admission. The ticket's corner is cut off to validate it, then you need it in that condition for the bus back. As the castle is far up a track winding through empty farmland, a longer trek from the nearest village than it looks on the map, dear me you want the bus back. But that means not losing your ticket as you carry it around with you all the time you are at the castle. As a coastal promontory in a Hebridean firth, this is prone to be a windy spot, with quick change weather. We saw it go from sunny to misted up in a few minutes. Yet the entrance kiosk has no shelter attached to it for the customer standing on the outside. You have no shield from the wind, as the man comfortably inside the kiosk hands out to you your clipped ticket, and a little till receipt for your admission, and maybe a note in your change too as bus plus admission is £11. 3 bits of paper, none of which must you allow to blow away or else your day is wrecked big time. So pronto you have to find a spot to park yourself, back to the wind, to sort them all out. Sit on the step beside the kiosk, is what I did.

What are the castle folks going to do with anyone who can't do a long country walk and who is stuck there with a loss of ticket? When the castle wants to close at day's end, and the stranded person is missing their ship off the island too, let's wonder? It makes a disability question that should be pressed. As a practical matter of safety, your status in moving around should never be allowed to depend on the successful safekeeping of several small scraps of paper in a windy place.

What about your bigger bulkier travelling baggage? Does that carry anxieties? Procedurally or emotionally, do you cope better with keeping it with you at all times or with leaving it in a place of safety? There is an aspie coping question in there, and you want the answer to work for you. Consider this prize piece of ticketing logic, from Oban station's baggage lockers: "This contains the security code needed to recover your luggage and keep it safe." Keep it safe: can you find any practicality and logic in a system where retaining possession of a number code on a ticket and not losing it is critical to recovering possession of your safely stored possessions? I can't even look down that vortex, the anxiety this should logically give you. You need safe storage, so keep something else safe as you go around ... I mean ... This is all some of what tickets, and their acceptance as a concept, do to our lives.

Maurice Frank