domdavis.com

So, continuing my introduction to the National Hate Health Service I decided to register with an NHS dentist…. yeah, I know. ‘kin impossible due to most of the dentists in my area not taking on new patients or being so rediculously far away that getting to them will be hard. Sod it, I’ll wait until I am in gainful employ again and go private. Much easier.

I’ve been spoiled at work. I had access to an on site medical facility which would see me within 24 hours, plus access to emergancy facilities should I need it. Now I’m back on the NHS and I have to wait weeks. For example, I need some pills (wont go into details, suffice to say it’s a simple case of going to Doctors, saying ‘I need pills for X’, they’ll go ‘yes, yes you do’, give me prescription, I toddle to boots, all is good with the world). I can go see the doctor next Wednesday when, to be honest, it’s going to be far to bloody late. The only other option I have is to wait until it gets to be an A&E issue and go to hospital. In the mean time I’ll be phoning the doctors at 8am every morning to see if there is a cancellation and phoning my old private doctors to see if they can’t write me the prescription and either charge it to the health insurance or just send me a bill.

I lost my pendant last night. I’m beginning to wonder why I even bothered getting up.

So why do you want to work for <insert company name here>?

Well, I have outgoings of x and you are offering me an income of y which is greater than x and so will sustain my lifestyle, you know this, I know this but instead lets offer some complete twaddle about you being market leaders in whatever bullshit area I can think of and gush about how you nurture your staff and how it’s an environment I could work in. Or perhaps we could dispense with the question and I could have that 5 minutes of my life back. Not really sure what the relevance is.

Where do you want to be in 5 years time?

Exactly where I am now. Dossing about on an income provided for me for not actually turning up to work. Absolutely ideal if you ask me, however, this is not a viable long term solution hence me pitching up on your doorstep offering to pimp my services for obscene amounts of cash. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re trying to work out if I’m ambitious or not, well in that case I see myself running the company in 5 years and I think I have the tallent and the balls to do it. Next infuriatingly stupid question please?

God I hate interviews.

Dear NXEA,

Why do you hate me? Is it because I no longer sling over 300 quid a month at you for a season ticket? Might I point out that I regularly throw money at you to get to and from London, Norwich and Cromer and that you are doing quote well in cash from me. Can I also point out I am quite heavily armed today? With that in mind do you think you could at least try and get an intercity into Norwich in time for my connection? It’s not like you even need to be on time. Hell, 15 minutes late and I’ll still make it. So what do you say? Extra hard effort and get this delayed [again] train in before 10:45? Trust me, you don’t want a pissed off me rampaging round the station for 2 hours
Lots of love,

Dom Xxxx

So we’ve all seen the idiot moron on television telling us how great Halifax is and how thier rates of interest leave all the other banks standing. Well a few weeks ago I found my old university ’savings’ account passbook (I say savings, I’d put money in there, then skim it back to £50 which was the minimum you needed to keep in there for them to pay interest so I never really saved anything) and low and behold did the last entry tell me that on the 12th of March 1998 there was £51.31 in the account. I was really quite excited, it was a savings account with a high rate of interest and over 10 years surely there should be some apreciable ammount in there now. Somewhere I think my maths went a little wrong and the interest rate kind of sucked. It goes thusly:

• June 1998: 44p
• June 1999: 26p
• June 2000: 26p
• June 2001: 23p
• June 2002: 9p
• June 2003: 5p
• June 2004: 8p
• June 2005: 43p
• June 2006: 37p
• June 2007: 41p
• June 2008: 58p
• Today: 4p

Sum total removed from account when I closed it: £54.55. Yeah. Hardly seems worth it. anyway, it’s an extra £50 to go into the ‘my God, I’m so poor I’ve had to stop getting every single channel that Sky does and just pay for the ones I actually watch’ fund.

I had a ‘fat day’ this morning as I got up and tried to take my rings off for a shower. Both of them were damn near impossible to remove. It was, of course, just water retention. They were fine last night, their fine now (and after 7 hours on a dancefloor one of then practically falls off by itself). I can at least look in a mirror and decide that, with the exception of a beer gut, I look OK and I do do a lot of excercise in order to shift the last few pounds, or at least turn them into muscle. This is probably due to the fact that I have half a brain and understand that I, like everyone else, suffer from bad lard retention and thus try to match my lard intake with my level of excercise. It seems that the poor unfortunates who have hitherto been hiding behind a medical problem now also have to face up to this fact. Welcome to the real world. Now are we allowed to finally say that half this country wouldn’t know a well balanced diet it it slapped them round their fat butts or is that still being fattist?

So my jazzy post things from the iPhone app keeps refusing to publish stuff and just crashes instead. This means you’ve missed out on two highly amusing posts penned by me as I travelled to and from Norwich today. I may rewrite them when I get home, but the moment may have gone. In the mean time I’m back to WPhone until I can either get an update or work out how to stop it crashing

As regular readers will know (on my phone so no linkies back to the relevant posts) I recently had Lloyds phoning me up about suspicious activity ok my card. I also decided I was going into Norwich to buy stuff. So this morning [just] I got up, got dressed, sorted a few things out and headed to the train station whereupon the ticket saga started.

I’m getting an intercity so I go to the flash intercity ticket vending machine as it gives you more blurb about when I can use a super saver advance daypex cheap day return and gird myself for the argument that invariably ensues about my card (it only likes it about 1 time in 5). After we have that argument and it finally allows me to try to pay it then tells me there was a problem with payment. Great.

So we move to a normal ticket machine. I know which ticket type I want now and they don’t seem to have a problem with my card… except today they do. Sod it, it’s only 18 quid, I’ll pay in cash, but noooo, this machine wants exact money only. Great.

Machine number three. Once again the card is refused but this time it’s accepting all denominations of pounds sterling so I can actully buy a ticket.

Then it occurs to me that there is probably still a block on
My card due to suspect transactions so I give Lloyds a ring (music fades out, god I love my phone) who confirm that, yes, for my safety and cinvinience they’d put a stop on my card. I pointed out it wasn’t very convinient and could they perhaps unblock it so I could take it shopping. Anyway, all sorted now. Ironically enough the song that I’m listening to now is quite apt for what is going to happen to my John Lewis card as I spend my ‘gorgeous things’ budget: Bind, torture and kill!

So I become a doley layabout scumbag tomorrow (I’m not sure when the transition takes place, but I think we can safely say that by 17:00 I’ll be unemployed, and yes, technically it’s today, but there is a period of sleep between now and then so it’s tomorrow in my mind, deal with it). Part of being a doley layabout scumbag involves me living on something called ‘A Budget’ which entails me not buying what I want, when I want and instead exercising something called ‘Restraint’. Now, as someone who was accused of buying a house like you buy a TV (not true, I put a lot more research into my TV and thought about it for much longer) this is going to come as a shock to the system. I used to be very poor (so much so I couldn’t afford to eat properly) but for the past 11 years I’ve been in the very lucky situation where I really haven’t had to worry about money which leads to some interesting habbits.

Lets look at food shopping shall we? You arrive at the supermarket, you grab a trolley, you sling nice stuff in the trolley, you go to the checkout, you give the nice lady [it's invariably a lady] a bit of plastic, bang in a 4 digit code, hey presto, shopping done. Cost of shopping has always been ’some’. When I smoked it was ’some more’, but the ’some’ for the food component was … well… some

I actually have a fixed amount of money I’m allowed to spend down the supermarket now as part of this budget thing [call it what you like, I call it a pay cut] and seriously, how do you lot cope? I walked in today and grabed some veg (not huge amounts), pork belly, bread, eggs, some shower gel and conditioner, flowers, few pasta’n’sauces a fajita kit and some pate. Twenty six bloody quid! And we’re not even talking about bread that isn’t just bread but bread made from the finest organic wheat crushed between the thighs of blonde virgins, no, this was just bloody bread. From Asda! It seems that if I am going to stay in budget for the month I need to make some pretty serious alterations so I’m going to bite the bullet and just up the supermarket budget… what? You actually think I’m going to try and be smarter about what I buy?

Still, it’s an interesting reminder on just how exactly divorced from the real world I am in some respects. Money doesn’t buy happiness, not by a long way, but it sure as hell removes a stack load of problems that can contribute to unhappiness. I’m still going to pry every penny I can out of the governments hands while I’m unemployed though. I’ve spent long enough being buttfsckd by the Inland <fatherless child> <fornicating> Revenue (or whatever their called now) and I want some of the vast sums of money I’ve paid over back