Unbef**kinglievable. Words can't express my anger and frustration but I'll try to enunciate.
Our social worker called on Tuesday and asked if he could come around on Wednesday evening. He then cancelled that and said he's come Thursday at 1930. Fine. Later than ever before, and a bit odd him coming in the evening. I should have known there was something wrong.
He said that he wanted to go through our Prospective Adopter Report and have a few questions to fill some gaps. Fine, there's a lot to go through when you're pulling two lives apart.
So, he turned up on time (tick) and we did the normal pleasantries - coffee and lemon drizzle cake - and then took our places on the sofas. All pretty normal so far. For no good reason I chose to sit in an armchair rather than the smaller sofa and I noticed the SW becoming agitated. Odd.
Then he says "Oh, erm, oh...er" and I ask him what's wrong. "Oh, it's just I wasn't expecting you to sit in that chair, you normally sit there on the other sofa." Yup...get me making decisions about where to sit in my own home. "Erm...and...er...it's just that I've got this huge hole in my trousers and I thought you wouldn't notice because you'd be sat where you normally sit". Seriously. Who needs to adopt when you have a SW who's enough of a child for all of us!
I duly moved back to my normal position and he settled down...to then tell us that he was "very, very sorry and feels very embarrassed" (more than the trouser hole - must be bad!) and that he'd "misplaced, not lost, misplaced some of our application forms and meeting notes". He "can't find" the 21 page application form with more than 100 questions about my life in it. He's "sure it's somewhere, probably in someone else's file" and has "definitely not lost it" and we must believe that he takes the security of our data very seriously...despite what he's just told us.
So, the upshot is that we have to spend three hours going over things we're previously talked about. We repeat dates, locations etc. for all house moves and school changes, we go over my employment history. All easy enough.
He's fortunately been able to type up many of his notes from his meetings with Max, it's just the majority of my stuff he's lost. Well, that's OK then. I try to reassure him that it's OK and that these things happen. He tells us we've still got one piece of info to give him and I tell him that us forgetting is the trade-off for him misplacing our forms.
He tells me "that's not the biggest trade off, but we'll get to that". Really? There's more?!
Yes there is. He's "very, very sorry and feels very embarrassed" (there's a theme developing) but most of the notes from my initial one-to-one meetings with him have "become damaged" and he only has fragments of them. Hmmm...how did they become damaged? "Well, this is very embarrassing and I'm very, very sorry, in fact I'm going to stop saying sorry, but my son got sick in my car and vomited on a pile of papers and they all became very soggy and I've had to throw them away".
Really? Really? You THREW AWAY the notes that you took in two meetings when I opened up my entire life to you? Threw. Them. Away.
We were both speechless. So he's got none of the answers to the 100 or so questions about my life, he's lost the family trees that we produced, the chronology forms that we completed and needs me to go over m life again to "fill the gaps"...and if we could do it by Monday morning that would be great because his report has to be completed for panel by Thursday in preparation for our meeting on 3rd May.
Apparently he's never missed a deadline yet. We got a different story from his colleague the other day and I'll be amazed if we make it. There seems like a lot to do.
The adoption system is not broken, it's people like this that slow things down and delay things. It's people like this that make people like us feel it's not worth the effort and that has a dramatic and negative impact on the children we're all trying to help. Shame on him for being this way.
On the plus side, we're apparently going to meet social workers for two children we've identified as potential matches although, at this stage, I find it hard to believe anything he says so we'll wait and see.
More soon...
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