Special Agent K and Agent S arrived at Mrs Z's house to help her with a covert mission. Mrs Z needed to defect from being a public transport using comrade to a capitalist taxi hailer. Her medical conditions meant that she could no longer stand in solidarity with her brothers and sisters on the bus. The fact was, she had trouble standing at all and couldn't walk more than a few hundred metres.

Mrs Z needed a Taxi Card and a Blue Badge to get her to freedom and allow her to live her life unencumbered. The most important entitlement to achieve this for Mrs Z was the Taxi Card. K and S knew what a Blue Badge was, it provides the holder an entitlement to park in disabled bays, but they'd never heard of a Taxi Card before. In this area, the agents lacked experience, so they did what any agents would do, search online and hope that the big G in the Cloud wasn't tracking their phone activity.

K got to work on her laptop, setting up an encrypted channel then checking out the application process for the Taxi Card. As expected with anything governmental, red tape and bureaucracy stopped them in their tracks. The application process needed a form to be printed. And a pen (blue or black). The completed form needed to be posted. In an envelope. Using a stamp. 😱😱😱

Given that Mrs Z was off grid and didn't have a computer, she was unlikely to have a printer either. Neither K nor S had packed one into their Agent's running bags this morning. Mrs Z's daughter lived across London, so she couldn't help either. K and S kept their cool and decided to focus on the Blue Badge application first.

K had helped with a Blue Badge application before and she remembered that it was a complex process. The agents had to earn Mrs Z's trust to show that we weren't in fact double agents before she would share her multiple medical conditions with them. Being undercover, they didn't carry any ID, so they unzipped their jackets and flashed their black GoodGym tees to prove that they were vetted to the highest level by the DBS.

Now Mrs Z felt happier sharing her documents and lists of medications with the pair, each of which were recorded on the Blue Badge application page. Mrs Z was being tested too by the questions the site posed, each of which sounded similar but subtly different to a previous one. She thought that it was trying to catch her out, to trick her into exposing that her story may be false. K and S helped as much as they could, though they couldn't be sure of the motives of the Blue Badge branch of the secret service.

As the questions became more and more complex, perversely, Mrs Z had to go up and down the stairs to fetch more supporting documentation to prove that she had trouble walking and that she needed the wheels that only the free world could provide. Some historic documents that would have cemented Mrs Z's status had been long discarded, so K and S made to with what they had, submitting the application, willed along by Mrs Z's hopes of future independence.

With the Blue Badge application completed, the agents took another look at the Taxi Card process. They found that as well as not having a hard copy of the forms, Mrs Z didn't have the correct credentials to hand to allow her to apply. They advised her to lie low for now and contact her handler once she was ready with the paperwork. GoodGym agents would be back in contact when the time was right.

Mrs Z was thankful for the help, yet unsure of what the near future held without the ability to hail a London cab. Another covert mission will be attended by GoodGym agents imminently.