A Dorset man who has been waiting 38 years for the Dorset Probate Office to settle his late wife's estate finally snapped today when he sent them a sharp email suggesting they should "get on with it".
He was later arrested by officers of the RDC's Armed Response Unit and charged with "upsetting a civil servant". In a statement read out to reporters gathered outside their Radipole Headquarters, a spokesperson for the RDC said, "we take the abuse of government officials very seriously and this man - who will not be named for security reasons - caused unnecessary distress to Mrs Pen E Pusha who was bravely working from home and was thus verbally assaulted in a place where she has every right to feel safe".
The arrested man - Mr Colin Mildmanner of 14 The Meadows, Piddletrenthide - was later moved to an open prison pending a bail hearing. It is understood that Mr Mildmanner has form - in 2004 he told a bank cashier that he had been waiting for the entirety of his lunch hour and was "a bit cheesed off about it"; whilst in an unprecedentedly vicious attack on a DWP call centre operative in 2018 he said it was "unacceptable to be left in a queue listening to The Four Seasons for over 18 hours". Having been told he should have [a] checked online instead, [b] made himself a cup of tea whilst he waited or [c] put himself on speaker phone, Mr Mildmanner had "exploded" telling the operative that he was "grateful for but unappreciative of any and all of his suggestions". He was later visited by a member of a DWP franchised enforcement firm and forbidden from contacting any member of the Civil Service for a year.
A spokesperson for the Dorset Local Government Officer's Association [DLGOA+] Mr Bugge Inns added "We take our members' welfare very seriously. An assault on one is an assault on all and this man went too far". Asked if, since she was working from home, the alleged verbal assault on Mrs Pusha had atually occurred in the workplace, the spokesperson was as unrepentant as he was unequivocal: "You'll have to come back to me on that one. It's a grey area and I don't want to say the wrong thing". Later admitting that the email arrived just as Mrs Pusha was rising from her chaise-longue to take her 15th mandatory tea/coffee/cigarette/comfort break of the day [it was 9.45am], Mr Inns continued to insist that the email from Mr Mildmanner was "unnecessary, un-called-for and unprecedentedly unpleasant ... absolutely not what our members are paid a small fortune to tolerate".
Explaining the delay in processing Probate cases, the Dorset Probate Office later explained that due to the massive increase in deaths resulting from the CONTRIK-69 crisis [more than 2 in nearly 18 months] the already under pressure office was near to breaking point. "Our 5,000 staff members are doing their very best in difficult circumstances. Average processing times have risen only marginally from 20 to 22 years over the last decade or so. Whilst we understand that, for some, probate is an urgent matter, many are too old to make a fuss and the majority simply die before we can sort out their relative's or loved-one's estates. Not that that helps us of course - it just adds to the backlog. All in all its a bit of a bugger".
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