Smythe's Blog

Aren't we all just ignorant of each others lives?

On reading a variety of posts about military accommodation standards I was stuck by how ignorant of service life many people in the UK are. I considered this and realised that I am probably quite ognarant about the working and financial life of Doctors, nurses, police officers, people on income benefit etc.. But we all seem to get really shocked and hurt when people don't know about US.
Lets face it most of us are pretty selfish and happy in our own little self enclosed lives, happy to be ignorant of others shortcomings in life. We might run out of reasons to complain about our own lives then. We all have the same expectations, success, a place to live, food to eat (not necessarily in that order) and, mostly, all of us feel we should be rewarded better for what we do.
When it comes to Service Family Quarters (SFQ) it is a popular misconception that we don't pay for it, or council tax. We actually do, it is deducted from our pay at source. Some people say just buy a house. A few things here. We're not that well paid, move to a new area of the country about every 2 - 3 years (sometimes more often) with no choice as to where we go to take up our new post. That means finding new schools for children, and spouses giving up work (they are then not entitled to much benefit as they are not sacked) and trying to find new work. Generallt it is in the lower pay bracket as local employers know that the new employee will not be a long term employment option.
Maybe we should all consider each others lives and be a bit more considerate about our assumptions before we jump to uninformed opinion.

posted by Smythe @ 6:13 pm