With or without a crutch

Here's another instalment of my putative book about life on the dole. It describes my first appointment at the Jobcentre in March 2005:

"At the Jobcentre I am directed upstairs to a department all pinks and purples. It is airy, or would be if the windows were open. The sun streams in.
I approach a woman at a desk. I say that I have an appointment but I’m worried I have filled out the wrong form.
'If you don't ask for the right one that's what happens.'
'How can I ask for the right form? I don't know what they're called.'
'What are you applying for?'
'Jobseekers I think.'
'Can you work?'
'Yes.'
'Then, it's Jobseekers.'
She peruses the form, decides that even though it's the wrong one, it'll do, stamps a couple of pages and tells me to take a seat on a sofa. But, before then, after I confess I’m new to all this, she advises quite out of the blue:
'Drop out, dahling. That's what you need to do. Just drop out.'
I sit as directed. The sun is streaming in and I begin to feel hot and claustrophobic, but I’m temporarily diverted by the supervisor.
'You know me, ‘ard as nails,’ she says to a colleague. ‘Customer had a crutch, didn’t he? Only tried to hit me with it. Another customer saved me. Frightening.''
Then another diversion when a couple of the women working there joke about whether one of them has a hickey on her neck.
'Go on, show us!'
I think I'll just walk over to the window. I want to move my limbs and catch sight of the elusive air out there. This place has virtually none. To reach the window I have to walk past an adviser dealing with a young pregnant woman with broken English. Strolling past the desk, I feel the temperature plunge. I have transgressed. The adviser is threatened by my unplanned-for movement.
'Sorry, I need you to go back there,' she says firmly as if dealing with a child (or a criminal).
I return to the nylon sofa feeling for a moment as if I’ve inhabited the body of a crazed petitioner capable of lashing out, crutch or no crutch."