Diary of an up and coming sociopath

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.