#75

There's background to this story, before we go on, which might be relevant...or not.

That VAT debt arose in respect of a part-time self-employed business I had all but closed down at an address was no longer visiting. The reason it was so overdue was that I not only.. https://twitter.com/joannaperkins0/status/1265387198070820864

didn't know it existed but I didn't understand how it could have arisen. That's my fault--it has to do with the VAT threshold and registration acting as a two-fold gateway to liability and my simply not mastering the ins and outs when I should have done.

(It also has to do with my not being good at opening post.)

I say that only to explain two things: first, that I became aware of the debt when I finally opened some post. That discovery on my part was contemporaneous with the bank account fiasco but the cause/effect relationship

was not made explicit by the bank in declining the application. Nevertheless, I inferred a possible connection and--not in the least understanding that I might have been "set up" for a financial check--it was one of the four points which tied in to my resignation in October 2017.

(I say I inferred a connection but that in itself--the feeling that I was being pressed by a strangely artificial drama to draw an inference of personal responsibility notwithstanding it was not my application, not my personal account and not my signature at issue--was sinister.)

The second thing is that there were people connected with the bank account application who might possibly have figured out the VAT situation before I did. There was a call from debt collectors to my office. The idea of the debt was so far removed from my reckoning

that I told them on the phone they'd made a mistake and put it out of my mind. But anyone who heard the call might have seen it differently. The other was an individual with links to my previous business address. I prefer to reject this idea because it involves...

at the very least a "friendly word" being passed along about my private business when that would be wrong. But it is possible, I suppose, that someone might think it was the "avuncular" thing to do.

Nothing in this thread is more than background--

but I will acknowledge that the timing of this bank account debacle has puzzled me. It's not as if I have ever been chased by debt collectors before or since. And yet the two stories are exactly co-extensive in Q3 2017.

And I suppose...well, here's the thing. If a person or

persons had knowledge of a lapse on my part and thought it was an obstacle to something or other, the sane or human thing to do would be to have a quiet word, wouldn't it?

Arranging an oddly contrived and discombobulating bureaucratic drama

followed by a kind of ritual humiliation would just be...well, is there a word for that?