Originally published at: An old lady with dementia needed her door handle fixed. A high-pressure door salesman got a £5,700 check out of her | Boing Boing
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Boils the blood, doesn’t it… That gentleman was a bit more polite than I would have been with that scumbag.
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“My mother’s vulnerable. Erm…what if someone came into your mother’s house…”
Too late, he already took his own mother for every cent twenty years ago.
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My blood is boiling too. No words.
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I honestly don’t know whether this is a Beschizza-ism or a Britishism of some kind or just an editing jumble.
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The magic is to pick a random mixture of UK and US idioms and throw them all together in article-free headline grammar.
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Sponcon = sponsored content?
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Ah, I think that was my missing ingredient. Thanks, it makes a lot more sense now.
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100% evil through and through; no doubt it votes tory.
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We just watched John Oliver’s piece on the American PACE program, a green renovation loan program that somehow enabled and practically encouraged contractors to fleece people (in MANY cases, the elderly and/or intellectually disabled) out of hundreds of thousands in unnecessary repairs and upgrades, and cost a lot of people their homes in the end. It was easily touted as a social program based on the language, but in classic American™ style was delivered through for-profit businesses. What a fucking debacle.
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One of my first jobs was working in a shoe store. Customer comes in, wants a cheap pair of brown slip-ons, well, that’s what he got. Manager took me aside, told me to steer the customers towards the more expensive shoes & that way I would make more money [if I were being paid comission].
Ever since then, I have never regarded Sales as being an honorable profession, & decades of dealing with various Salesdroids in different settings has disuaded me from that opinion.
In Sales [as in Politics], a good line of bullshit will serve you well.
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Oh, the pane! The pane!
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My Dad spearheaded development of the UK social services’ Adults at Risk program in the Nineties, and this kind of evil shit was his day-to-day. No names were ever revealed, but some of the horror stories he’d come home with were deeply shocking.
Of course, his work never got the press attention it deserved, because any press about UK social services back then was only ever focused on child services.
Still, it makes me ridiculously proud to search for “UK Adults at Risk” and his name, and see his articles and training are still in circulation.
Since he retired, my direct line in to what’s happening in UK social services has completely dried up, but I suspect it’s still very much the case.
I also know that towards the end of his career, he was lamenting the fact that the work was becoming ever more bureaucratic, with social workers’ hands being tied in scenarios where previously they’d be able to intervene and offer actual support to people.
Thanks to a few high-profile child services cases where things had gone horribly wrong, red tape and accountability increased exponentially throughout all departments. And I suspect that’s what’s happened here; social services in this lady’s area simply don’t have the resources available to be able to protect her.
Dad always describes social workers as “the dustmen of society”. There’s a social stigma associated with the work, but a healthy society needs them.
Of course, modern social work has its own complexities and hazards. Social media and blame culture makes the job even more difficult. My step-sister and her husband moved to Australia, and he decided to become a social worker over there (it’s like the family career; I sometimes feel like the odd one out!)
Not long after qualifying, he got accused of abusing his position, which was eventually disproved and thrown out.
But it highlighted for me that vulnerable people have increasingly socially dangerous ways of lashing out these days that must make the job even more difficult to navigate.
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That was a great piece! The program I work for was mentioned at the very end 
in a good, well, not bad way.
PACE is a prime example of the difficulty of designing good policies and programs. The overall idea was good and meant to help people, but the implementation was a tragedy of lack of oversight and twisted incentives.
People complain about the “cost of bureaucracy,” with govt programs, but the checks and balances and oversight are what holds everyone accountable to fulfilling the mission. 
ETA: I hadn’t yet read @Mungrul’s post before posting this. Nothing I wrote here is meant to disagree with the facts that sometimes the added red tape can be a true hindrance!
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I generally do not care if otherwise normal people get scammed: “Say, this Prince seems legit and he says the UN Diplomat is at our airport waiting to hear from me…” but preying on vulnerable elderly and mentally disabled is not to be tolerated.
Elderly does not always mean vulnerable and vulnerable does not always mean elderly.
So it is better to just wipe these scammers out of existence.
We need to start treating these leeches as harshly as we treat some poor Black kid with a gram of Cocaine and stop treating so called white collar financial crime as harmless.
More education about this stuff too. Teach people they have no obligation to be polite or listen to sales critters/missionaries/political hacks who interrupt their lives.
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