carry 2 baskets of European currency

While social media bonds folks in different countries far more intimately together than leaves Brexit and the political popularity of borders making any sense, and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg recently spoke in favour of a Basic Income system and progressive tax! travel is still oppressively user unfriendly in all the process it makes you get right and the lack of back-up if it goes wrong.

In ANS's autism strategy document An Ordinary Life Too (PDF book link) we touched on the pressure from the worrying losability of travel documents - tickets, passports, air boarding passes, money cards. It is an impracticality, that endangers everyone, to have no clear and committal answers on what to do when such things go missing - as they obviously can, as human error and crime both exist. An unjust society motivates suicides in vulnerable groups and a just society will never penalise in any way human error or being a victim of crime. The unfair story that a couple burgled during their wedding could not go on their honeymoon to Iceland because their passports were stolen, as well as proving the sheer evil of everyone who wants passports to exist, gave me a fear of telling anyone socially about an intended foreign holiday before it happens and I know I have arrived successfully. Which means using experience to juggle whose sympathetic contact numbers to carry.

Losable travel documents are a barbarity, continuing to be accepted because they exist: a dangerous anomaly left to continue, and us all left to navigate the dangers of, because sone politics of money is stirred up when you devise ways to abolish tickets. Passports are the offensive passbooks of a global apartheid. There is a disability discrimination in losable travel documents, for dyspraxia and motor clumsiness in handling small objects is linked to the autistic spectrum, and increases the chance of losing things. It is an equalities claim against losable travel documents being allowed to exist.

The pressure of losability creates a dilemma with money cards. If you have managed your life well enough to have more than one, is it safer to carry only one, leaving the others at home not to get lost, or to carry them all in case you need the funds in any of them, especially if one gets lost? For anyone in the typical position of having one bank debit card, this question is pressed, made a dilemma, now that the new Post Office Travel Card has blossomed into existence and replaced travellers' cheques. Travel insurance presses even more acutely, enough to quite reasonably just put you off travelling at all, whether you have made the safest choice with your cards so that they can't turn round and say you did not.

Experience travelling with ELAS indicates the answer. The answer is yes do carry them both. I venture to share this to help all aspies be confident towards your travel insurers, that yes that is the right choice, and establish clearly that it is. Something shows so from experience. You might overlook a spend, or find an extra spend present as needed, and that is not good if you only carried one card and the spend concerned could be covered by the other card, or using the other card for it makes the difference to whether you are left short of money for the rest of your holiday. As soon as you have another card in use than your main debit card, that pitfall exists. You might want the main debit card funds. A particular danger is with the bad system of online booking sites for hotels that book you but expect you to pay on arrival and don't let you more sensibly pay on booking - even if the site uses your debit card to confirm the booking. Anything could happen to the traveller to upset their carrying of everything they need, before they reach the hotel and need it to be an already safely paid for refuge. Hotels can actually have the wrong setting shown on a booking site, re whether a prepayment will be taken: that comes from an ELAS member actually asking an hotel that does not prepay, after making a card backed booking on booking.com. Or, after the transaction of securing a booking uses your card, it is easy for your mind to file that as dealt with, then missing that you still need to take that card in order to pay with it, to decide it would be a good safety idea not to take it because you are taking another card, the POTC.

So take them both.

It's complicated enough that you need 3 different types of password for the card! That is not explained when you buy it, either. You get an "access code" number that you need to quote any time you phone them about the card, and when you create an online account to work the card especially for checking your balance in each currency and topping up. Then of course this online account itself requires a password. Then separately to either of these, the card itself has a PIN number!

You will benefit from knowing another problem with the POTC that its marketing does not explain, and should, as part of explaining all details of things clearly to spectrumites. To use any other card to top up your POTC, you have to register the card's details onto the online account for your POTC, it does not let you use Paypal, I think it should, and the first top-up transaction may set off your bank security system as perceiving an "unusual activity" and disabling the card and making you phone it, clearly at big coping inconvenience if you are abroad. It is suggestive of the banks deliberately wanting to make the POTC harder to use and put folks off it, because it is a rival for them.

Advice Shop

The Advice Shop, on South Bridge, the council's so-called service for money problems, advertises in its own shop window that it's impartial. It's not impartial at all, and has now admitted the fact in the written minuted record of meetings hosted by social work about a complaint.

I have been fighting for years over a council tax appeal, which I repeat annually, which the council refuses to recognise as an appeal. This is obviously a money problem of malpractice - lodging council tax appeals is an entitlement enacted in law, and the council absolutely does not have the power it is claiming to exercise,. it does not have a power unilaterally to decide that any appeal should not be recognised as an appeal.

The Advice Shop will refuse to take up such a case or represent you. It is outside its powers, because it is a conflict of interest to pursue your fight against the position taken by the same council as pays their salaries. This they have openly said in answer to the complaint. How impartial is that?

But there is a deeper concern, for the ethics being shown to vulnerable groups, and specially to those with a communication problem. Advice Shop will not actually take this position of refusing until you complain against them through social work, and in my case it has taken as long as 2 years, from first contact, to reach this position. The type of case that Advice Shop now say they can't take on, at first oh yes they do take on. They take you on, on a false basis, but never actually engage with the council on behalf of your case. They try to manipulate you into giving in to what the council says. They keep sneaking that assumption into their advice, while declaring themselves not qualified to answer your reasons for holding that the council is wrong. If you stand by it and press them for a committal position on what you are saying, they will take a view against pursuing your conflict with the council's position, on the excuse of the worst-case legal risks, no matter how obviously the council's position is wrong, while continuing to refuse to take any position on the merits of your reasons for saying the council is wrong.

In effect this means they will side with the council, against you their client, and test your will to stand up to it. Then they will say, we have reached an impasse and you won't cooperate with our advice.

They won't do what they literally claim they will do. Indeed, at the time of accepting my case they gave me a form to sign to allow them to represent me, which would give them a blank cheque over what to do, and when I carefully added extra words to it to tie them only to uphold my case not retract it, they made pressurising noises and hand moves trying to stop me. I knew not to trust their agenda, from that moment on, after seeing them willing to try to make you sign things under pressure instead of you taking your time to scrutinise them first. This is a public help service towards folks in all sorts of vulnerable positions, doing this. Testing our ability to stand up to themselves, in the hour when we had come seeking support in standing up to the council!

I have established now, factually, through social work, the well foundedness of complaining of these practices. It is an ethically disturbing pattern of testing our vulnerability to manipulation in conflict with our own wishes.