For a long time now I have been bleating on about Lady Luck and her less than charitable treatment of myself, and no doubt many others - quite right too. However, the identity of the aforementioned old bat had remained a closed book to me. I knew she was lurking and I knew she gave me a periodic boot in the family secrets from time to time, but her actual identity was a mystery. Well, I've worked it out. I know the answer.
However, knowing the answer and telling every bugger and his dog is not in my master plan, not at the minute. Besides, my answer may not be the same as the answer to the identity of the Lady Luck of other folk, if you see what I mean. There isn't just one, you see, there are hosts of the nasty sods.
At the minute (she changes as circumstances demand) my own Lady Luck is, of course, the Smiling Assassin! I saw her yesterday - not to speak to, I'd rather remove my left eye with a burning stick - but I saw her, lurking and looking definitely shifty as she sharpened the blade ready to plunge it into some poor, unsuspecting fellow's spinal chord.
Anyway, she now seems to have got the idea that she is qualified to make recommendations about the future of the poor saps she can get her nasty little digits into. At this point I will mention her qualifications, just for a bit of a laugh. She did an OASys Training Course and a MISAR Training Course (whatever THAT may be.) Now she thinks she knows enough to make recommendations about the future of both prisoners and their families - destroying lives basically. The fact that she doesn't understand the reports of those better qualified than she is simply overlooked, and there would appear to be no checks or balances on what she herself writes about anyone.
The Smiling Assassin has her own agenda - she dislikes prisoners. She will smile at a person with the greatest of sincerity and promise the earth, but then go away and plunge her vitriolic dagger as deeply into the heart as she can.
Now, I knew all of this about her before I ever met her and had been told by everyone who had dealt with her that she would take anything and everything that was said to her and pervert it, so I wasn't going to give her anything to pervert. Ha! What a simple, naive child I was. It's my own fault - I had heen warned several times so nobody to blame but myself really.
- I told her I had studied some of the work of Robert Hare (the psychologist who created the PCL-R assessment): she wrote that I had learned how to beat assessments.
- I told her that I was uncomfortable discussing family: she wrote that I had denied having a family.
The thing about her, and the reason she has earned the name "The Smiling Assassin" of course, is that she can seem so sincere to the face and assure the prisoner that she will go and do everything she can to help and assist him. She leaves the prisoner feeling better, as though he has a sort of lifeline. That's why her stabs in the back are so much more hurtful.
This brings me neatly to our old friend and comrade in arms, Leo Tolstoy - born in 1829 and died in 1910, just in time to miss the revolution he had advocated for so long. Tolstoy wrote:
I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.Maybe we should consider changing The Smiling Assassin's name to Leo - it's easier to spell.
The Voice In The Wilderness
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