Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Thought I should check in before the totals mount too heftily and I lose track. Though, I didn’t actually spend any money on Sunday. In fact, while I’m thinking about it, the ground rules I have laid out in my head state that if I don’t specifically give the amount I spent on a day, I didn’t spend anything. Like Sunday. Didn’t spend a penny, which is lucky, because today I paid the council tax, my domain name auto-renewed, and I bought some cheap comics because I failed to win them on eBay, then found them on sale until midnight tonight on a website. It’s frighteningly easy to justify any purchase. The council tax is twice what it should be, because we’re paying off three months of living here but not paying it (oct, nov, dec) because we hadn’t been billed, over the rest of the tax year (jan, feb and march)

Council Tax: £66.25
Domain renewal: £6.93
2 Comics: £3.78
Today’s Total: £76.96
Cumulative Total: £154.15

Well, great. That almost equalled an entire week’s spending in one day. I also know that I have to buy a travelcard, some comics, and some shopping in the next 6 days too, which is going to put me at about another £50 by the end of the week, at least. Joy.

Picture, if you will, a normal Friday morning in South Ealing. The sun breaks over the rooftops, as normal. People leaves their houses and head for work, as normal. An alarm clock wakes me, and I find my backpack making a noise and shuffling around, as normal.

Wait.

This is not “normal”. SOmething is amiss. Usually, when my alarm wakes me, I turn it off, roll over and wait for the second one to go off, after which time i deactivate the third one before it goes off and attempt not to sleep off the crappy feeling of waking up in the morning. I don’t, in the normal course of things, find myself upright in bed trying to figure out why my normally docile and slow-moving backpack has become so animated all of a sudden.

A normal response to finding unexpectedly animated things in your room as you awake is, naturally, to grab a baseball bat and commence the thrashing, however, at that time of the morning I was still struggling with the idea that my bag was quite possibly about to have its revenge on me to do anything, so I just sat and stared, locked in stalemate, waiting to see which if us would make the next move. It did. A dawning comprehension crept over me as I realised that it was actually something inside the bag that was moving, which again, I found odd because inside that bag, I only keep few pens, two notepads, a london A-Z and my headphones. The morning was taking a quite unexpected turn. I did all that my instincts would allow. I reached over and prodded the bag before recoiling. It stopped moving. Unwittingly satisfied that my feeble attempt had assured my superiority over my newly mobile notepads, I grabbed the bag and moved it about a foot, laying it down.

As I let go, a brownish blur streaked from the neck of the rucksack, and beneath my computer desk. By this point, even to my sleep-fogged mind, the pieces were all falling into place. I had been, or rather, the half-eaten bar of Dairy Milk Biscuit I had left in my bag yesterday at work, had been the victim of a rodent attack. I’d say it was a mouse, but I had virtually zero chance to see it. It moved as if propelled by the pure essense of speed. The only reason I’m sure it was a rodent and not some giant spider is because my mind refuses to comprehend the possibility of a giant superfast spider that chews through foil and eats chocolate bars (and luckily the scientific community is, more or less, united on that fact)

Unable to do anything more to deal with this sort of thing before work, I informed my houemates of our new situation and headed off to work. Ian has set some traps while I’ve been gone (I’m at Nikki’s this weekend) but so far it’s been taking the bait and evading capture, which I assume means we’re dealing with some kind of super-mouse, or at least a seasoned professional. Or some really shit mousetraps. As I understand it, the diver is failing to launch correctly off the seesaw.

Today I took Nikki to hobbycraft in Coventry, and we stopped off in the centre to have a look round, and so I could buy some comics. Then we went to leamington and I bought the pixies live album from fopp, because I have a hard time paying more for it when I know it’s only a tenner there. I remember when I used to say, back in the days before my eyes opened, “I won’t bother with the live album.” Well, sod that. The only reason I haven’t bought it before now is because I’ve been too damn poor, and that’s not much of an issue these days. Only the demo album left to go (until they release some more..)

We went up to Dad’s to say hi, and then Mum and Terry took us out for a meal at the Knowle Carvery (with Karen and Graham) where I was positively elated to see they had the mashed potato back, which I haven’t seen at one in over a year. Spurred on by this excellent situation, i piled my plate high and somehow managed to eat most of it, and a dessert, though by the end of that I was getting kind of shaky.

and, now the fun part, the totals for the last two days:
Friday:
Can of Fanta: £0.50

Saturday:
Petrol: £15.00
Two Comics: £3.85
Coke/Chocolate from Woolworths: £1.15
Parking in Cov: £0.50
Pixies Album: £5.00
Acoustic 4 Album for Nikki: £7.00

Fri/Sat total: £32
Cumulative total: £77.19

At work, I’ve come to realise we represent a well-oiled machine, spread across international borders. I’ve also realised that when a computer in france breaks down, it means I spend 4 hours on my ass waiting for them to fix it so that I can do what I’m being paid to. My abilities are severely limited without the backoffice. In fact, I was seconds away from just requesting the second half of the day off when the backoffice came back up. I think I managed about 3-4 hours work, between 12:30 and 4:30. Amsuingly, it had the good sense to only work at the point where I was supposed to be on a lunch break, but after 3 hours of doing nothing, I was almost begging for something to do.

In the mean time, I did buy myself some transformers stuff from the newly discovered Play Asia, the Japanese version of all our favourite DVD sites, Play and Play USA. Of course, I got two randomly packed transformers PVC standups, only to discover that I had given myself a two in five chance of buying a suspiciously naked child toy(bottom left.) Oh, those wacky japanese. quite what compelled them to put a naked version of a preteen computer program from one of the shittier transformers serieses in a set that otherwise consists entirely of stuff from the decent (G1) series is beyond me. Quite how I’m going to explain that one to the customs officer is an entirely different worry. Naturally, I’m hoping for a Convoy and Devastar (Optimus Prime and Devastator, to us westerners) hell, I’d enjoy a Rumble and Frenzy set, but it concerns me that, what with them being randomly packed, I’m quite likely to end up with one, if not two TAIs (TAI being the naked child’s name). I guess I’ll find out in a week or two.

The amount of times I’ve typed the word “naked” and the word “child” makes me worry for the types of searches I’m going to draw to this site. Might have to go back and change those words if I begin to draw in unsavory types.

Yesterday, I spent no money. Score one for me. Today, I bought the transformer things, and a can of fanta at work. I don’t have the exact conversion on the transformers thing, since I bought in US Dollars, but I have calculated a rough value, so I’ll amend it if I turn out to be wrong.

Fanta: £0.50
Transformers Figurines: £7.35
Today’s Total: £7.85
Cumulative Total: £45.19

Hmm. I’m sending the need for accompanying spreadsheets and graphs, and I’m only 3 days in. I’ll try and hold off for now, but by the end of the month I’ll probably have a powerpoint presentation to download…

The travel situation was slightly better today. I say “slightly” because it still involved getting on a train home which then decided to stop at acton town and let the passengers figure out how to cram onto the next heathrow train, but still, it at least didn’t spent a good 15 minutes not moving, so by contrast that’s quite good.

What wasn’t so great was the amount of time I spent I sat around at work this afternoon because the backoffice was fucked. When this happens, I imagine a room full of frantic people in France running about the place like headless chickens, and maybe that’s actually what’s going on, come to think of it. There’s only a limited amount of stuff I, or anyone at work can do without the backoffice, and since it never came back up I could actually only write down what I had to do when it was working again, which will be tomorrow now. At least that sets me up for the morning, which is always a bleary and incoherant time for me, even without the added pressure to do work.

I did discover that the new ben folds album is on the brink of release, though, with a single coming quite soon. I really should buy a ticket for his gig, lest I be denied.

And so, onto my new month-long experiment/feature. This is how it’s going to look every day until either I get paid, I get too bored of doing it, or I get too nauseous from the harsh truths of where all the time I spend working is actually ending up:

£25 on 1 week travelcard
£12.34 on a birthday present for Tom
Today’s Total: £37.34
Cumulative total: £37.34

That’s quite a high rate for the first day. I can’t spend that much every day, that’s for certain. Luckily, the £25 will last a week and means that I can travel almost anywhere I need to in London without paying more, and since I go to work at least five days out of 7, it’s a nice bargain. Technically, then, I’ve spent £15.91 today, if I consider that the travel card costs £3.57 a day. That’s a far less steep rate, and roughly sustainable under my current income.

Ugh. If there’s one thing I don’t need, it’s a fire alarm 15 minutes before I’m about to leave work. It made me late leaving, that made me late getting on the tube, which was late due to signal failure, and then I was stuck inside a really crowded carriage barely able to move my limbs for 30 minutes on the way home. Besides that, it’s been a fine day though. I’ve mostly just been waiting for a hefty paycheque to arrive, which it should do tomorrow. Then I can go and buy that CD Stacking unit I’ve wanted since I bought a bookcase and discovered I didn’t have anywhere near enough space for my CDs.

My concept for this month, which I just came up with and we’ll have to see how well I stick to it, is to see how much I spent between this pay packet, and next. I was mildly concerned by how much I spent of what I was paid in December, though that did involve things like christmas and paying off some bills which I still owed for. I’m hoping/planning that this month will be far more frugal. Let’s see if I can’t budget this pay for a month in advance and see how well I do?

£368.00 - Rent. For the house I live in.
£125.00 - Travel: £25 a week on tube fares, and at least £25 on petrol seems generous enough for the month.
£66.00 - Council tax. Pays Ealing to leave a streetlamp nearby lit 24/7 since we moved in, and to cut down local trees.
£60.00 - Food. £15 a week is an accurate-to-generous allocation for what it costs me to eat.
£50.00 - Bills. i’m not sure what bills are coming in, but I’m sure this’ll be ample cover for them.
£25.00 - Probably about the minimum credit card payment I should make.
£20.00 - CD Stacking unit. Purchase and delivery.
£20.00 - Comics for the month. A necessity.

That’s a grand total of £734.00 that I’ll be spending. I consider this stuff to be the essentials, after I’ve bought myself a DVD or album or gone to a gig, that should leave me with around £300 by the end of the month, which I can put towards paying off my debts. Wow, this is going to be a fun experiment. I hope other people’s financial data doesn’t make you uncomfortable, because unless I get seriously bored, there’s going to be a lot of it in the coming weeks.

If you’ll excuse the indulgence of metablogging, I’d like to talk about the previous post. If you don’t like it when bloggers talk about blogging, skip this entry, and likewise if you don’t like it when people ramble on about ideas in an attempt to focus them in their own mind, don’t read it either, because this is definitely one of my more meandering entries, and coming from me, that means a lot.

I got quite an odd reaction to that last post. No comments, when I’ve been relatively brimming with them in previous weeks, and yet an unprecedented number of people spoke directly to me in order to tell me they thought it was good, smashing previous records of congratulation. Not only that, but noticing some odd statistics in the webstats, I found that several people had reposted the stuff on some other sites. That kind of thing annoys some site owners, but I’m not bothered really, I don’t care who takes what from here and reposts it. I’d prefer to be identified as the author (in most cases) but then, as I saw with the Muse post last year, bringing lots of people here for any reason seems to be a bad idea. Besides which, stealing things off the internet is practically what I do best, and it’d be hypocritical to go around trying to maintain tangible rights over stuff I’ve put on there myself. I don’t care, who puts it where and whether they have my name with it. As long as I know I wrote it, that’s enough for me. In fact, all the better if people found it good enough to share. The other sticking point tends to be bandwidth, and I’ve got plenty of that to spare, so why not?

Of course where my Muse album “review” subjected me to around a month of abuse from rabid fans of the prog rockers past their prime, in this case it’s met with a more polarised reaction. Some people are coming directly to me in order to say how great it is, other people like it so much they’re putting it about on messageboards for other people to read. Then there’s another group of people who seem to have missed the point that it was a joke, or not found the joke especially funny. One forum goer said “the last three pictures are the same, but different colour…?” when it’s quite plain to see that the last FOUR are the same, and that yes, that was kind of the point. Some people accused me of ignorance, some people accused me of genius, and all in all I’m kind of relieved that, for a change, the inarticulate and downright insulting comments aren’t anywhere near me. A different forum to before described the post as being willfully ignorant of the scientific value of intrasolar exploration, to which I can only say…well, yes, it was. The whole joke, such that it was, kind of hinges on me focussing on the aesthetic value rather than the scientific value. I accept some people might not find it funny, the nature of telling a joke is that some people won’t get it, but it’s the adjectives like “pathetic” and “uneducated” that I find most bemusing. I seem to have actively offended some people by taking the piss out of a bunch of remote rocks.

With that in mind, I’m kind of in two minds about whether to request people reposting stuff (which has happened with quite a reasonable frequency) to identify me as the author and give me a link. On the one hand, I don’t want to deal with morons because, while it’s fun, it always involves me insulting their spelling and them sending accusations of homosexuality, but on the second and final hand, why do I write this stuff in a public place if not for other people to read? It’s primarily for me, but secondarily, it’s for my legions of fans, and the more of those I have the stronger I become, and the easier it’ll be to convince everyone to cast of the shackles of the martian overlords and rise up against local government in an orgy of chaos and destruction that sweeps clean the old ways and brings about a new order. Which I believe is what all this is wokring to, I haven’t quite figured the logistics out on paper yet.

Wait. Where was I again? Ah, sod it, that’ll do. Let’s just hope this isn’t taken as an invitation for people to begin leaving grammatically challenged insults.

I know I wasn’t going to talk about money, but today I received the excellent news that I’ll be getting a couple of hundred quid as a bonus for how well the tech department did last quarter, at work, 6 weeks of which I was involved with, so I thought I’d share my glee at that. This job just keeps on giving. I also got confirmation that my contract will be extended by another 3 months, so I’ve got employment through until the end of May, by which point I’ll actually be in a financial position to start looking comfortably for work again if they don’t want the contract to continue. This contract extension guarantees me, more or less, the crucial “6 months experience” of legitimate work which was previously quite hard to pretend I had. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

So, glad of that news, I move to the next item on my agenda, the reason I sat down to blog today. I am interested to see, of late, that we are moving beyond the reaches of our planet, sending probes to all corners of our solar system in search of, well, whatever’s out there.

Now, let’s see. What’s out there?

The recent Spirit Mars Rover sent back this, an image of the Martian Surface. The location most exotic and certainly the most prominent in human imagination since the start of last century.

Outstanding.

And now, the Huygens mission has delivered us this, a picture of Titan, named after the giants that strode the land in classic Greek mythology.

Out…standing…

And finally, The Moon. Earth’s watchful guardian. Revered since man could comprehend the sky.

Great stuff.

So, does anyone else see the common thread here? We have spent millions of pounds, thousands of man-hours, literally centuries of waiting to see just wha it is that’s actually out there.

The answer?

Rocks. Shitloads of rocks. You like rocks, then we’ve got just the solar system for you. Jagged rocks, slightly less jagged rocks, those odd shiny rocks people sell at the seaside, any kind of rock. Just come to Sol and we’ve got your rock. “Rock On, Sol”, the marketing slogan would go.

Now, based on the information provided by these probes, I’ve managed to extrapolate information about some of the other planets in the solar system. For instance:

Mercury, closest planet to the sun.

Venus, closest planet to the sun except for mercury.

Pluto, cold, dark, and named for Mickey’s dog.

And finally, some as yet undiscovered purple planet, possibly residing around some far distant star.

I’m expecting NASA to call any minute. Or maybe that Beagle guy with the mutton chops.

By christ, i’m getting neglectful in my old age. To be a little less candid, blog updating has become difficult of late, what with all the things I’m doing. Sleeping. Eating. Going to work. It’s a verible storm of activity the likes of which I couldn’t have dreamed of back when I was unemployed.

Speaking of which, you may or may not know that I applied for council tax/rent assistance while seeking work, just in case it got to the stage where I needed it. Imagine my surprise when, at the end of last week, they finally sent my assessment back, some 3 months after I put the form in. I was trying to figure out how, in the event that I had needed it, I would’ve been able to continue when they didn’t send me back a damn thing until several months after it would’ve been necessary. Presumably the trick to this kind of thing is to make the application a few months before you think you’re going to need it. Perhaps it would help if there were a form you could submit prior to this so that they know your applicaiton will coming and they can rush it straight to the top of the “to do in 3 months” pile.

This is much like online banking. I just transferred £30 to Ian to pay our electricity bill for the year, and I’m once again bemused by the process by which money gets from my account to Ian’s. In this age of computers and internets and all sorts of boxes of tricks that take the fun out of paying your debts to people, leaving them virtually unable to break your legs because you never see them, you could almost be forgiven for thinking that it should be more or less immediate. This is not the case. Having clicked “submit” I found myself £30 poorer, but it’ll be a full three days at least until Ian gets the money appearing in his account. For some three days I am £30 down, he is £30 down, and somewhere in the digital ether waiting to be nicked by someone is my £30. I’m quite certain this is because an online transfer probably happens no differently to any other. I strongly suspect that clicking “submit” prints out a form and sticks it on the desk of a data entry monkey in Barclays/Natwest/wherever who then has the unenviable task of typing it in. You don’t have to be a systems analyst, or even remotely fluent in the invented language of the systems analyst, UML, to know that any system going Barclays Computer -> Data Entry Monkey -> Natwest Computer isn’t going to be as efficient as one which went straight from one to the other. At least the computer doesn’t hate its job and won’t accidently type an extra zero rendering you financially ruined.

It’s all guesswork, that, of course. The truth as to why my money takes three days to go from one bank account to the next is probably far stupider.

And continuing with the fiscally related theme (Maybe I’ll try and go a week without mentioning money after this) is that, having accidently withdrawn £50 more than I needed for my rent, when Nikki suggested we go buy me a bookcase on saturday, I put it down to serendipity and acquiesed. We got it from Argos, because I was going for the “no frills” approach to furnishings, and eventually navigated the 5 dimensional multistorey car park to put the box in the car. After constructing about 60% of the bookcase, I realised that it’s not really possible to nail the back on with the end of a screwdriver and we had to go and buy a hammer. I was quite glad of it, actually, because the Wickes we bought it from in Boston Manor looked like the kind of place you might want a weapon to fight your way back out of. Cost me £5, for a 20 oz hammer, and although it was a little overkill for nailing in the tacks that hold thin bit of board on the back of the bookcase, it’ll probably be well reusable in the future. If nothing else, I can use it to exact revenge on the neighbours (who greeted our tenancy by hammering our shared wall for 8 weeks solid) by waiting in their bushes after dark and beating their faces into a bloody pulp with it.

Haven’t got much to check in with, except to say that downloading a bunch of “Last Chance to See” MP3s (the radio series of the douglas adams book of the same name) has made me realise that listening to music only engages your brain so far. Narratives are what really keep you occupied. Having something entertaining playing in my ears this way can at least double my ability to work, because while not a bad job, what I do can become repetitive towards the end of the day. Once I’ve got something interesting to listen to, I can keep going at full pace for many extra hours. It’s not like it lowers the quality of my work either, in fact today I was correcting the mistakes other people made as I went. I think it just sharpens my thought processes with extra stimulation, which keeps me alert, and ready to do work, whereas if I haven’t got that element of the comedy/humour/novelty value of having a dead man’s voice ring in my ears the sleepiness that I stave off from the moment I wake starts to creep in around the edges and I find myself typing nonsense.

I did listen to Radio 4 a bit last week in an experiment, but as I may have mentioned, I found myself listening to a documentary about the colonisation of Antarctica during WWII and the international tensions caused by it, and suddenly I began to wonder how that was less boring than not having anything to listen to at all. Since I’ve long since dispelled most daytime music radio stations (even XFM) as being too enraging to keep on listening to on any regular basis, I also gave a few radio serials a try, but they’re almost universally horrendous. Smug and self-important, seems to be the way a radio story likes to approach things. I’m going to download HHGTTG and give that a try though, if only because there’s enough of it to keep me going for a few weeks. I also experimented by ripping the audio from episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and listening to those. It’s still really funny, and I can’t tell if that’s jsut because the show relies heavily on dialogue over animation, or because I’m remembering the animation, but occasionally I’ll be laughing to myself like some kind of nutcase. I’m not sure how well that technique’d work with, say futurama, but maybe I’ll give it a try.

I’m fortunate, really, to be in a job at a workplace where listening to MP3s and radio isn’t forbidden, nor is it considered antisocial. In fact, I do it less than the people sitting around me, becasue I don’t have much material just yet, and I’m wary of becoming bored of the stuff I have got. I can usually last until about 3pm before my brain starts slowing down. As long as what I’m listening to doesn’t start affecting my work negatively, I don’t think it’ll be a problem. Thank christ for being employed in comfort.

Recently I’ve been trying to talk myself out of getting a new mobile phone. It’s been years since I actually bought one, though Ido tend to steal Nikki’s cast offs and stick various SIM cards in them. However, now that I’ve got a bit of money, I keep thinking “Yeah, I should get a new phone. One with a camera. And an MP3 player. And GPRS. Maybe I should just get a 3G phone! I could video phone people. Hey, this is a nice handset, with handwriting recognisition…” And so on until I suddenly find myself looking at a £40 a month contract with a £150 handset on top. I don’t remotely need that type of phone. I can’t really even afford that much. I think I’m just severely lacking in gadgets and spending day upon day categorising the best deals in consumer electronics is starting to take a psychological toll on me.

So, let’s try and be objective here. What reasons are there to get a new phone?

I want GPRS. I am regularly annoyed that there’s no internet nearby where I can look up prices for the DVD I’mconsidering buying, or get a map of the location I’m currently wandering aimlessly around. GPRS would fix that. It’d also give me the ability to IRC on my way back from work, which would be a novelty at least.

I am currently lacking in serious gadgets. By comparison to not only my friends, but the general social trend, my phone is next to useless. It can text people, it can phone people, ad it’s an alarm clock/watch, but besides that it might as well be a sodding paperweight. Where’s the digital camera? Where’s the java version of lemmings? Where’s the MP3 Player? There’s so much mor eit could do, and so many functions that I’m just plain missing out on. I have a reputation to uphold and yet here I am without the ability to send a video message.

That’s it, really. Let’s face it. I don’t need a new phone any more than I need a kick in the head. I know I said “objectively” earlier, but all I’ve got is a bunch of non-reasons that boil down to “I really want one.” Anyone who remembers my years of agonising over buying a new monitor, despite the fact my current one was approaching unusable will know that I hate actually spending money on stuff I don’t need (except for DVDs and comics, of course) I’m still languishing without a bookcase because £25 seems like a lot of money for just a bookcase that while I “need” I don’t actually need so you can imagine the problems involved in signing away 12 x ~£20.

However, the biggest point to ridicule is that I don’t spend remotely close to what the minimum contract I can get would cost. There’s no point buying a handset for £200 because that’s just bad value, but no contract I’ve found is small enough that it’ll be cheaper than the £5 a month I’m currently spending. I know I could expect to use more than that if I had a contract, but what’s the incentive there? I can do more stuff, for four times teh cost? Damn fucking right I’d better be able to! Each £15 I’m not spending on a phone contract is £15 that’s going towards comics and DVDs and more bookcases than I know what to do with.

Rationally, economically, it makes zero sense and the only reason I want one is because I’ve been brainwashed by the corporate media and yes, yes, all that anticapitalist stuff which I know makes a lot of sense and that I can see as plain as day, so I’ll probably just avoid buying a new phone for many months to come. But god damn, if it isn’t tearing me up inside.

Okay, with that out of the way I promise the next entry will involve things more relevant than “I am too poor to justify wasting money on a cool yet expensive new phone” because there’s a fair amount of concern that this is all temporary insanity brought on by work, because this much consideration shouldn’t be going onto matters so trivial. Tomorrow it’s back to stuff that matters: Kirk or Picard?