EDITOR – At the age of 55, and after 15 years’ service with my company, I find myself in the awful position of being retrenched, for no fault of anything other than our bad economy.
I then prepared myself for the worst supposed nightmare, registering for unemployment. Well, what a pleasant surprise. As instructed by a very helpful woman on the telephone, I needed to go into their offices on 2 January.
On day one, everyone was so helpful in helping me get the ball rolling. I had to then return with necessary additional paperwork the next week. I arrived at 7am (doors open at 7.30am). From the time I arrived and joined the long queue outside on the pavement, we all received a good morning from the security guard who directed each person into the correct queue. He then stayed with us until we were all safely inside. Once inside, once again he listened to each person and redirected them to which area they should sit in.
In my section they were short staffed due to staff illnesses, so there was only one woman attending to us all. To speed thing up another woman came and collected whatever she could to speed the process up.
When it was my turn, although the poor woman had not even had a two-minute tea break, she was so nice and very efficient and very caring. I would like to thank everyone at the Department of Labour for being such awesome, caring people. I salute you.
Christine Kelly
Kloof
