I have had an email from the Prison Service informing me that I am not suitable for employment in their venerable organisation.
The email contained considerable detail explaining why. It appears that I have passed all of the requirements except two. One of these, as we know, is the bleep test.
The second is the Assertiveness assessment.
I am not assertive enough to become a prison officer. I am, they explained, with regret, too timid.
I was so surprised by this description of myself that I had to read the letter several times before I could properly understand what it was saying. When I had finally worked it all out I did not quite know what to think.
Of all of the unemployable faults to which I might have felt obliged to confess, lack of assertiveness would not have been among them.
It wouldn’t have made the shortlist.
It wouldn’t even have been allowed to apply.
When I told Mark he thought at first that perhaps they might have mixed my assessment up with somebody else’s. In the end he thought that perhaps it is because I lack the conviction with which to impose the Prison Service’s well-intentioned-but-rubbish equalities-and-correct-speech agenda on people who are already, as far as I can see, in a difficult enough situation. He thinks that this may be the quality they have decided that they want.
I can see that he might quite easily be right. I do not lack assertiveness in any other imaginable sense of the word. Anybody who knows me will confirm my steam-roller determination to achieve my own ends. The thing is perhaps that my ends are simply never going to be theirs. It might be that.
No surprise there really.
Perhaps I should have made more of a fuss about not being allowed to have a locker.
They concluded the letter by inviting me to come and take the bleep test again. Why they thought I might wish to do this I have got no idea, since it would not make any difference to the outcome, but nevertheless the invitation, along with a detailed fitness programme to be undertaken in preparation, was issued.
I am not invited to come and be more assertive. The lack of that quality appears to be immutable. No matter how successfully I might bleep, I will not be an acceptable prison officer.
I am not going to try and reapply. I have done it now and have had enough.
Between you and me I am secretly rather relieved. It would have been an awful lot of getting up early, and the uniform trousers are polyester.
In any case I think I would probably have been chucked out during the ten week residential training course that followed. I do not think I would have been able to do what I was told for ten whole weeks.
It was a good job that I was not on a training course today, because I had to get up and go to get Lucy from school.
Oliver was still in bed, looking wan and sorry for himself, so we gave him some more drugs and a chocolate brioche and told him to go back to sleep.
Mark was working in the village all day, drilling holes in chalets for poking cables inside, so he promised that he would be responsible for the well-being of both Oliver and the dogs. I drove to York for Lucy.
She had finished early, and bounced happily out of school just after eleven. We had a cheerful drive back, catching up with news. I told her all about not being a prison officer, and she told me all about learning to drive. The instructor says she drives too fast and brakes too hard, which made me wonder if this is a genetic quality.
She is still planning her career in the security industry. Once she has got her A Levels she thinks she will do a degree in criminal psychology and then join the Army.
Lack of assertiveness is not ever going to be her problem.
I might not have it myself, but I don’t think I need to worry about my daughters.
Have a picture of the Lake District.
