Tag: bills

#oneaday Day 571: An August Sort of Gentleman

I hate August. It’s one of the biggest pain in the arse months there is. It’s partly through my own doing that it’s a pain in the arse, of course, but it’s also an unfortunate combination of things that it’s not particularly easy to do anything about.

The reason it’s a pain in the arse is that it’s always expensive. During the month of August, I have to pay my car tax, renew my car insurance, and get my car serviced and MOTed. When I lived away from home (which quite soon I will be again, yay!) August was also the month to renew the TV license and, if I was moving again (which I did every year for quite some time) find some way of scrabbling together a deposit on a new place to live.

This year is going to be no exception. Tomorrow it’s the annual “cross your fingers and hope the car survives” experience of getting it serviced and MOTed, and inevitably there’ll be SOMETHING wrong with it that needs fixing, which costs more money and time. While people are hitting it with hammers, or whatever it is mechanics do while they’re servicing your car, I’m also going to go and get my car tax done which, given the “Do It Online!” system that the government was so excited about when they introduced, should be an easy process, but unfortunately isn’t, largely because of the combination of other factors that August throws your way.

Boring factoid: you can’t renew your car tax online if your car insurance is about to expire, even if you’ve already had the renewal paperwork through. This completely negates the convenience aspect of being able to do your car tax online because you then have to go to the post office and queue for hours and ARGH.

I am going to beat the system this year though by only renewing my car tax for six months while renewing my insurance for a whole year. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, August!

Breaking up the month is next week’s trip to Gamescom in Germany, when I’ll be far to busy to worry about mundane things like tax, deposits and all that sort of thing. It’s fairly unlikely I’ll have any time to socialise (sorry, “network”) let alone think about things which aren’t happening RIGHT NOW in Cologne.

Following that, I’ll be moving house. This will involve handing over a large wad of cash to an estate agent (or possibly handing over a debit card and closing my eyes) but at the end of the process there’ll be a new place to live available to me. Which will be nice. But then I have to move all my stuff there. Which will not be nice. Moving house is stressful, but fortunately there are no time pressures this time around, which means I can take my time over bringing stuff in gradually rather than having to get everything done in one night.

(Incidentally, there are those who say that moving house is as/more stressful than the breakdown of a marriage/divorce. Having been through both I can say with some confidence that the latter is infinitely more upsetting and stressful than having to carry a lot of boxes and furniture into a van, sometimes throughout the whole night. The former may well do your back in and cause you to be completely knackered, but the latter does unpleasant things to your emotions and brainy parts, as my blogs from last year will attest. Just in case you were wondering.)

I’ll be happy when September arrives. When I was a schoolkid and later a teacher, September was a stressful time — time to go back to school. But as a “normal” person now with a regular job that doesn’t take six weeks off in the summer, it’s just another month — and more significantly, it’s the month after the pain in the arse that is August.

So sod off, August. You’re a pain in the arse.

#oneaday Day 70: Waste Not

[The comics for the next few days are a little disjointed as I’m going away for the weekend. Fans of Rogue, if there are any, will be pleased to see he has his own utterly pointless mini-series.]

I’m sitting in my “study” (for want of a better word—it’s the room I have with my desk and computer in) and despite staring at the screen enjoying the wonders of the electronic, digital age (such as this delightful blog) I am literally surrounded by pieces of paper. I don’t dare throw any of these pieces of paper away because one day, one of them might be important for something I can’t possibly predict. I have discovered this to my cost a number of times in the past.

This is annoying, though. I have one of those expandy box file things that has burst its seams because of the amount of shitty useless paperwork crammed inside it. Some of this paperwork is from houses I haven’t lived in for five years. Some is from, I don’t know, last week? All of it is completely useless, until you really need it, when it becomes the most important thing in the world and consequently is nowhere to be found even though you know you put it in that section of the file and can remember looking at it and thinking “I know this will be important some day“.

Conversely, I know that if I have all these shitty annoying stupid bits of paper everywhere and close to hand that I will never ever need them ever again. And then I will throw them out to tidy up. And then I’ll suddenly need them again.

Why? Why do we surround ourselves with such crap? The world is full of so many wonders and yet it seems that in order to just survive and go about our daily business we have to sign this, keep this safe, keep this secret, remember this handy 300-digit number that also includes letters just to be awkward, keep every single piece of paper that includes numbers and currency symbols just in case you need to show people that you understand what money is or something, and read 15-page long letters that make no sense but basically amount to saying “if you break something or have it nicked, you can have some money but only if we feel like it and by GOD we will investigate thoroughly for the best part of fifteen years before we even think of paying out”.

And relax.

I should probably add at this point that I’ve never had to claim through an insurance company so haven’t encountered the above situation before, but I did do some temping for a firm of “loss adjusters”—a profession I didn’t know existed before I did that job briefly—and was alarmed to discover some claims had indeed been going on for a healthy number of years. I was also shocked to see quite how many pointless companies exist in the world. In one instance, an insurance company contacted the loss adjusters who contacted some surveyors (odd, since the loss adjusters had their own in-house surveyors, but never mind) who contacted some builders who contacted some architects who contacted some draftsmen… and then they all contacted each other back in the other direction again. This isn’t an exaggeration for comic effect, there legitimately were that many people involved. No wonder we’re drowning in fucking paperwork.

Please consider the environment before you print this blog post. And please consider the environment before you post me a metric shit-ton of paper I will never read.