to resent the census requiring details of employer from years ago

I also did mine online, cant remember this bit, I guess my memory must be getting bad?

professional vegan?

MerylStreep

Elderlyperson
I think you need to find an absorbing hobby.
Why are you ruminating so much on meaningless issues, it’s not healthy.
I don’t suppose it entered you head to put something witty in the last job box.

It did, but I was frightened of being fined.

I felt shabbied and humiliated by a bully who had power to hurt.

Callistemon

^True, but it may well come round again, and again, and ... for the rest of your life.^

Is that why I've had phone calls informing me that I have an unpaid tax bill and that the police will shortly be arriving at my door to arrest me unless I press 1 on the keypad NOW?

I thought it was a scam.

No, that was a scam.

MawBe

Full, detailed and excellent reply at 10.40 is Monica - you have explained very clearly why elderly person really is getting worried about nothing.
You may lament the passing of your high exalted status but nobody else knows or indeed cares. You are a statistic - no more, no less.
Just a thought, however, you are not Justin Welby are you? (Archbishop of Canterbury recently photographed selling the Big Issue on a high street) but no, you say you are a Sir and he isn’t.

No, I did not say that I am a 'Sir'.

The letter about filling in the census about being fined £1000 and ending 'Yours sincerely' was from someone whose name was listed as Sir name.

I am only addressed as 'Sir' by some people in shops and the like, and some people otherwise have so addressed me at times as a courtesy when there was no obligation for them to do so.

greenlady102

oh good grief! You might as well say that the employer is shackled to me and has to bear the mortification of being linked to all the good stuff that I got up to after I retired.....including drinking alcohol.

But the employer is not so linked. It is just the human being who is the victim of this outrageous nastiness.

M0nica

An individual's information on a census form is going nowhere. There are strict rules over confidentiality and always has been. When have you read a story of the census details of an individual coming out into the public sphere? This information will not be given or seen by anyone before 2121, if then.

I appreciate your concern, when you end up leaving employment under circumstances you have not chosen at a time you would not have chosen, it is bruising. But you are not alone and it is happening to people more and more these days.

I left work under a voluntary redundancy scheme, not because I wanted to, but I realised that my profession had become redundant and if I didn't jump when asked and when I could benefit from the soft landing from the severance parachute, once the scheme ended, I would just be pushed out of the door without a parachute.

As for 'thats life' well wherever there is a cut off date someone will be just the right side of it, someone else just on the wrong side. someone will be half a centimetre to join the police force, someone will just creep through. One 5 year old will just get through the low height door to get into a child's entertainment, the next will be too tall.

Life is full of these 'that's life' moments we just squeak into or squeak out of something. We win some, we lose some. but - that's life.

I did read of a case of information given for a census being used outside the census some decades ago. It made the newspapers.

A man put on his census form that he ran his business from his home.

Two days later he got a letter from the council demanding that he pay business rates on his home.

He complained. It turned out that the man who was collecting and collating the census returns as a short term extra job, was a local government officer (lots of them were) and in fact worked in the rates departmentof the council.

The man lost his appointment as a census official because he had broken the agreement that what he learned doing the census work was confidential.

As for height for rides, I have seen adverts for these where it states in the asterisked bit that height restrictions apply, but does not say what the restriction is and whether it is a minimum or a maximum.

I remember calling at a motorway service area where there was a bouncy castlec attraction for a fee and there was what lloked like a hastily prepared notice scrawled on what lloked like part of an old box that said "Children only". So perhaps something had happened and they didn't want it happening again!

Yes, there are such thresholds. It does not make them right though. With modern computers there need not be cliffedge thresholds, there could be gentle slopes. It just needs a bit of care o be taken when rules are devised.

When I filled in my 2021 census form the question ElderlyPerson homed in on just passed me by. But, as someone who has been researching their family history for more than 50 years, I hope that the information I gave might, in over 100 years times, give my descendants at least a little peek into my life. The census is only a snapshot in time but can be very enlightening. However, censuses can also be tantalising for family historians as so much can happen in 10 years and we are often left wondering why people moved to different parts of the country, why they changed their jobs, etc.

Callistemon

You could have just written:
'Gentleman, living on own means'
Which one of my ancestors had written on an old census firm.

Yes I could. But I would have worried for months, even years, of the possible consequences of doing so. So I took the humiliation route. I wish that I had had the strength to fight, but I didn't, all I can do is let it out here in a safe environment.

AcornFairy

When I filled in my 2021 census form the question ElderlyPerson homed in on just passed me by. But, as someone who has been researching their family history for more than 50 years, I hope that the information I gave might, in over 100 years times, give my descendants at least a little peek into my life. The census is only a snapshot in time but can be very enlightening. However, censuses can also be tantalising for family historians as so much can happen in 10 years and we are often left wondering why people moved to different parts of the country, why they changed their jobs, etc.

In the 1970s I had one job for several years between censuses and there is thus no census record of it.

I hope that the information I gave might, in over 100 years times, give my descendants at least a little peek into my life.

Me too. I’ve been looking into my family history lately and also came across someone living on their own means, as well as an annuitant. Both from bog standard coal-mining families (like me), so I’d love to know where they got the funds from. Perhaps they made it up.

I don’t get it - don’t you realise that you are a statistic - nobody cares - and words like “branded” or “humiliation” as opposed to your “high exalted status” do suggest serious, if irrelevant hang-ups somewhere.
Are you sure you aren’t Justin Welby- former Archbish now Big Issue seller?

In the 1970s I had one job for several years between censuses and there is thus no census record of it

Why on Earth should there be? Are your professional or academic achievements not enough in themselves?

MawBe

^In the 1970s I had one job for several years between censuses and there is thus no census record of it^

Why on Earth should there be? Are your professional or academic achievements not enough in themselves?

I was just meaning that for all its claimed purposes, the census only records some things but misses others, so it can be highly misleading.

Maybe the consensus answer to the original AIBU question is 'yes' or is it polarised, or is it nuanced?

I wrote Jedi Knight on mine last time, perhaps you might do the same.

Like some other posters I have no recollections of that question but I had the same job from which I retired for 15 years previous so perhaps it wasn’t on my online census

I always see humiliation as something we impose apon ourselves, not something other people impose on us.

Towards the end of my career I was interviewed for an internal post where the interviewe'rs whole purpose was to make me feel inadequate so he could then give the job to someone we both worked with. I put in a complaint about how the interview was conducted.

After HR had spoken to him he called me into his office and asked me whether I had been humiliated by the interview and my response was no, I hadn't, I had seen the interview as an attempt to humiliate me and it had failed. The only person who could humiliate me was myself. by agreeing to it.

So ElderlyPerson I do understand how humiliating some events can be, but you can unhumiliate yourself, by refusing to be humiliated. By now all those people involved in the event have moved on and completely forgotten about about the event. I very much doubt the senior manager involved in my little episode, would even remember me and I am sure all the others on the periphery of the event don't.

One of the joys of retirement is that you can rewrite the past. Remember the good things, if you ever discuss work with anyone, talk only about the good things and just forget about the difficult parts, we all have them and I am sure most of us revise the past.

A census form is a photograph not a film. It photographs things as they are the day the census happens. All sorts of things happen in the intervening years that are not recorded in the census, job changes,several house moves, children are born and die and never appear in a census.

It is just a photograph.

MawBe

I don’t get it - don’t you realise that you are a statistic - nobody cares - and words like “branded” or “humiliation” as opposed to your “high exalted status” do suggest serious, if irrelevant hang-ups somewhere.
Are you sure you aren’t Justin Welby- former Archbish now Big Issue seller?

I am not Justin Welby. I think he is still Archbishop of Canterbury.

I don't have a high exalted status.

I was just meaning that for all its claimed purposes, the census only records some things but misses others, so it can be highly misleading.

The census isn’t meant to cover the entire panoply of anyone’s life. It’s a snap-shot of the nation on one day. A day in the life of, if you like.

My family and I were living in Nigeria when they had a census in about 2006/7. We were included in the census but it’ll be fairly obvious to anyone looking at it in the future that we are not Nigerians and given the area where we lived, they will be able to deduce why we happened to be there. It doesn’t mean we’ll be forever thought of as living in Nigeria.

ElderlyPerson

greenlady102

oh good grief! You might as well say that the employer is shackled to me and has to bear the mortification of being linked to all the good stuff that I got up to after I retired.....including drinking alcohol.

But the employer is not so linked. It is just the human being who is the victim of this outrageous nastiness.

how can the link only go one way?

M0nica

A census form is a photograph not a film. It photographs things as they are the day the census happens. All sorts of things happen in the intervening years that are not recorded in the census, job changes,several house moves, children are born and die and never appear in a census.

It is just a photograph.

But it is not just a photograph.

A photograph records just that instant.

A census wants to go back about some things and disregard other things.

A lot can depend on how something affects oneself.

For example, when I was at school, the tables in the dining room were the same people every day, originally randomly assigned, you were then there permanently, mixed years. We had to pay dinner money each week. One boy, several years older than me did not pay, he had free school meals. Nobody commented. I was one who paid, like most people. I never thought then, but maybe that boy felt awful about it. Maybe he wished that he could pay just like everybody else.

Recently I saw somewhere that some school had a separate dinner queue for pupils who had free school meals. Totally wrong in my opinion. Nobody at a school should know who gets free school meals. It should be organised so that parents get a bill or pay by standing order and some pay nothing. Perhaps each child should not know whether he or she gets free school meals.

Ultimately it is only people who organise these things. THey could do a lot better. They should do a lot better.

Elderly did you move from a high status job to a lower status one, or was the final job itself in some way embarrassing to you?

SueDonim

^I was just meaning that for all its claimed purposes, the census only records some things but misses others, so it can be highly misleading.^

The census isn’t meant to cover the entire panoply of anyone’s life. It’s a snap-shot of the nation on one day. A day in the life of, if you like.

My family and I were living in Nigeria when they had a census in about 2006/7. We were included in the census but it’ll be fairly obvious to anyone looking at it in the future that we are not Nigerians and given the area where we lived, they will be able to deduce why we happened to be there. It doesn’t mean we’ll be forever thought of as living in Nigeria.

I remember once that years ago, Andrew Faulds, an MP who had previously been an actor, raised an issue about a census question and he was laughed at, but the then Speaker stuck up for him.

The issue was that his sister was concerned about a census question.

It wanted to know where she was born and asked her, if born outside the United Kingdom, the present day name of the country where her place of birth was located.

She was born in British East Africa, where her father was a missionary. The census question was requiring her to answer 'Tanzania' and she was concerned about how this could be used to undermine here citizenship status.

On a separate issue, I have had forms that I have had to fill in which have asked my nationality and had the instruction 'If British, leave blank.' No way, I thought, not leaving it blank. So I wrote Full United Kingdom Citizen in the box. Never leave boxes blank.

muffinthemoo

Elderly did you move from a high status job to a lower status one, or was the final job itself in some way embarrassing to you?

Yes. I took the lower job so that I could try to support myself.

It did not work out, through no fault whatsoever of mine. Now I am forced to be locked to it. Had I not tried to support myself I would not be locked to it.