Benefits

and the pitfalls involved in negotiating bureaucratic minefields:

1. Getting one system to talk to another

2. Working on several contingency plans simultaneously with the knowledge that some or all of them may be superfluous.

3. Being a well functioning adult without being suspiciously so.

4. Having to have enough money to be able to indulge the luxury of being poor.

5. Dealing with people whose job it is to patronise you.

6. Trying to work out who you can be rude to... both in terms of strategy and solidarity (even if you see their acts as bad faith)

7. Reconciling yourself to the 'way things are' with some modicum of integrity.