You could not make some things up.....

A short while back I wrote how I would be intertwining serious posts with silly humour.

Today I am at one of these "where do you start" moments, management is actually beyond livid. I have not seen her this angry since, well I am not sure when.

Picture the scene, last day the house is running along as nicely as a house where 11 children have just sat down to tea might do. Well when I say sat down I would have to admit that some of them SAT down for tea...

Anyway all is happiness and light and then the phone rang.

Now, two of the looked after children are part of extended sibling groups, one of them has been trying to contact his sibs for 5 years and has so far got as far as speaking to his brothers wife whilst the brother hovered in the background declining to speak.

The other was promised contact with his sisters last year but since then of course his social worker abandoned the case and nothing has happened.

Soo anyway out of the blue the phone rings and it turns out it's his sister.

Lets not get confused here, this is good, this is very good.

So anyway sister makes a brief first call then says she will call back shortly.

This is exactly the sort of mayhem yp's mum likes to cause so we rapidly get on the phone to the emergency social worker who was to be fair most excellent.

Young man was very surprised, confused and scared. What was she like, would she really call back or would she be like mum and not keep her promises.

Sister phoned back and spoke to management who found her totally delightful.

But it turned out that sis had phoned the office yesterday afternoon and the SW had given our contact details to someone he had never met in the same way as you might dish out smarties. Now, those not in the UK might not realise the technical word for this is illegal..

Not to mention of course the bombshell effect that this had on the household.

Lets add in some extras, 1 child doing their mock A/S 2 doing mock GCSE's the rest doing their normal end of term exams, fantastic timing then!!

But look at this realistically it's great for the one child but is this the way to treat a co professional?

Yes one child was happy excited and surprised, totally put off his stride for the exams in fact.

The other was deeply distressed and dismayed, totally put off his stride in fact.

Really this is the sort of stuff you could not make up.

The pearl in the crown though was the subsequent phone call. Poor hapless SW, OK so he did phone first thing this morning, but the poor little soul was concerned that he was being "blamed". Hang on, so far, we had not tried to blame anyone, we had actually asked if this was an OK thing to do, not blame anyone.

Apparently this was not about best practice courtesy or respect shown to us, the important thing was that he not be blamed. This is British social work in microcosm, the important thing is not harm, not best practice, not respect it's all about avoiding blame.

So all in all it's been a lively little day. The icing on the cake, she went outside this morning the windscreen was iced up and the wipers ripped as she switched them on.

It would be OK if this was a first but it was only a short while ago that they gave mum my mobile number so that she could contact her son whilst we were on holiday in France, OH yes, they volunteered me to pay the international leg of her phone calls.

And no of course they didn't ask...

I think I need to go and fill the chainsaw with fuel, a bit of chainsaw and axe therapy is indicated.


R