Please sir, I want some more...

I hate being broke. Hate it with a passion close to religion. When I have no money, I have no options. I have to prepare all my food out of whatever is in the pantry and the fridge. I have to wear the clothes that I have sitting in my cupboards and drawers. I have to go to places that are free, or else sit at home. I have to work. That's it. That's all there is. And right now, I am very broke indeed.

I switched to monthly pay from weekly not too long ago. Alright, it was almost six months now. That's beside the point. Come the end of every month, my bank balance has so many zeroes in it that it looks like binary code. Without the ones. But it isn't the end of the month right now. In fact, it's just past the middle of the month. And I've been existing on the grand total of £2 for the past fortnight. How on earth did I get in this situation?

It's a question I've asked myself many times. I'm yet to come up with an answer that doesn't shift from month to month. See, at least part of the reason always involves debt in some way, shape or form. I owed my flat mate bond on our new flat. I had a credit card to pay off. I didn't work for 4 months whilst still paying bills out of my company account and ended up owing the the government when tax time came around. Snow Patrol and Take That both release tickets to their concerts in the same week. Cheap airfares turn out to be attached to expensive cities - and even more expensive hotels. There are many reasons. The question is, why is there never a month without one? In theory, I earn very good money. I ought to be able to live in a very comfortable style. Yet here I am, petrified that I am going to lose my job and that I will, essentially, by out on the street with nothing. I own no property. I have no cash assets. All I have to show for many years in the workforce now is a long list of experiences, all with no financial value, and a mountain of personal debt that is larger than the GDP of several small countries.

It's not enough, not nearly. As the crisis looms - the axeman is poised over my job in a terrifying way, right now, like so many people in my industry, and there are few enough other positions out there that even the recruiters are turning away prospective applicants without giving reasons - it all starts to seem a little frivolous. I want my own house, my own car, a bank account with more than 30p in it, a grown up life like many of my friends seem to have. Yet they sit on the other side of the fence, eyeing off their mortgages and wondering what it must be like to be me, with no ties, nothing to keep me from whipping out the credit card (assuming it hasn't melted, but they don't know about my dirty little secret, debt, do they) and jetting off to some place where the words credit crunch simply don't translate. If only I could find it...

Virgin beyond the pale

Yes, that's right folks. In spite of numerous rants both online and on the telephone, complaints wherever I can get them heard...I'm still waiting for a phone connection. It's been over a month since the first technician told us what the problem is. Since then, another four techies have come and confirmed the opinion of the first. It's looking like he was the most competant of the lot, so far. For one thing, he found the flat without needing three phone calls, unlike this morning's effort.

I've yelled. I've been sarcastic. I've been calm. I've been logical. I've even tried irrational on for size. I've also been yelled at, laughed at and generally treated like an idiot.

But in the all of this, I have learned several things. I have discovered that, much to my shock, there is no higher authority to take such complaints to. Virgin Media are not overseen by the telecommunications ombudsman. The Office of Communications claim that they do not deal with individual complaints. My local MP is powerless against the giants. I don't even know if there is a minister with this as part of their portfolio. I do know that there are a whole lot of disgruntled customers out there. It's time that there was someone to step up to the plate and deal with this. Telephones are a crucial part of modern life, and doing without one even for as long as we have is, quite simply, unacceptable. If it wasn't so bloody annoying, it would be interesting to see just how long they can string us along. Without Virgin, we have no phone line at all. BT promise they could send an engineer out to install a line within 7 days. So why can Virgin not match this?

I'm getting too tired to try and fathom the whys and wherefores of this now. I'm over it, and I'm also making a name for my flatmate (no matter how I try to explain that the account is in her name, not mine, that I am NOT her, they keep calling me by her name) among the occasionally lovely but often enough rude people in the customer service call centres of Virgin. I'm not unsympathetic to them - it must be soul destroying to work in an evironment where all you deal with all day every day are problems created by someone else. But for pity's sake, just get someone to solve the issue. It would make everybody's life more pleasant.

Fear and Loathing

I have passed the point of being able to care about anything other than the two obsessions currently driving me back to regular blogging. Virgin and the Credit Crunch. The Credit Crunch and Virgin. It sounds like some crappy Holloywood comedy about a teenage girl and her breakfast cereal. But instead, the combination has me twitching and terrified, in equal measure.

The twitching I've dwelt on many times before. I'm hoping that it will be resolved today, as the heroic Virgin engineering team walk in slow motion down the stairs to my flat, where they will find my flat mate's ex-boyrfriend lurking there to ensure that they do their jobs. But surely such super heroes couldn't fail again? Especially given that the last lot of meg failures at least took the time to put fluorescent green paint around the point on the footpath that they need to look at, just in case there was a chance they could miss it. I'm certain that I will get home tonight to find a working telephone. About as sure as I am that I will sprout wings and fly home.

The terror comes from an entirely different source. I'm on rolling 2 month contracts at work, in an office that has just started its second round of redundancies. This time it's the senior staff who are under the hammer. But it makes me think about the fact that they're paying out people ho have been with the company for far longer than I have been, with much more knowledge to offer than I have. I'm sensing that my job is far from secure.

I've been looking around for something more permanent anyway, for the past couple of weeks. There is nothing out there, I keep being told. Or at least nothing that would suit me. The recruiters are either most apologetic, or almost rude in their rush to ignore me. This is the true source of my terror. Because without a job, I'm lost.

I've been looking into alternatives in case the worst should happen, trying desperately to think of something else to do. Sewing and writing are my other "things", and neither of them is terribly useful given my lack of application. I mean, I have three partial novels posted on a website to get feedback. One has been up for months, but the refining process has been...prolonged, shall we say. I'm the worst editor in the world. I tend to get very attached to some of my things. Take one of the novels, for example, which in short hand I refer to as 'Katie'. Katie has been on the go now for several years. It is a silly flippant read, about a silly flippant girl with a serious intelligent mother. I know it's overwritten. I know I have a deep and abiding love of adjectives and adverbs that bogs it down. I know it needs work. But I never seem to get around to it.

I still don't think I needed the lecture from one of the reviewers, who told me I should learn the rules governing the use of apostrophes, because I was using them 'as a grocer would' (note: it's called a typo, you anal retentive prat. Given that the rest of my work is riddled with them, and there were only 2 errors in apostrophe use in a 10,000 word piece, I'd have thought that much was obvious. Your own grammar could use some work, too, gramps). Nor did I deserve the comment that perhaps 'serious library-haunting girls would appreciate it, but he doubted it. It's not that bad - 8 out of 9 reviewers agree that it has potential - but I know it does need work. It was not deserving of the across-the-board 1s that he rated me. But in spite of being fired up and angry about him, terrified of the looming no-work-no-money-no-food-no-home scenario, and loathing pretty much everyone right now - especially Virgin - I'm finding it difficult to muster the energy to do anything about any of it.

So, if anybody knows of any good motivational techniques - or a half decent proof reader, because clearly I need one - feel free to drop me a line. I promise to save the invective for those, like Virgin and the idiotic reviewer, who truly deserve it.

Is there anyone alive out there?

It seems that everyone at Virgin Media is either brain dead or terminally stupid. Harsh opening, perhaps, but that is the conclusion that the evidence I have seen to date leads me to. See, the saga of the phone line continues, as does the inevitable time with me listening to the lovely Miley Cyrus. Although today I did learn that the higher up the chain you go when you complain the more annoying the hold music gets.

Today was the day it was all supposed to be resolved, at last. I was promised that I would never have to make another complaining phone call. I was promised that if I did have to make such a call, I would have a landline on which to make it. I was promised, in short, everything that I should have had about a month back. As might be obvious from the fact that I'm writing about this yet again, Virgin has, once again, failed to deliver. This time the engineers did make it into the front yard. I was home sick - well, not sick exactly, but I have no leave left, I did need to make a trip to the doctors this morning, and would end up needing the afternoon off anyway, so to all intents and purposes, yes, I was sick. The massive pounding that's going through my head whenever I speak to Virgin now is sure to trigger some sort of brain explosion, so I figure 'sick' is a fair enough assessment. So I had a great vantage point to see the two men who came a poked around the garden for about 5 minutes before they disappeared. I was a little slow though. They'd gotten to the van and driven off once again before I could run after them and find out what their thoughts were. Because it's for damned sure that there's nobody at that bloody company who will call me to inform m of anything.

I did eventually call someone. I'm past the point of ranting now though. It was quite a reasoned conversation, which is miraculous when you think that the people on the other end of the phone were telling me exactly the same things that I was told by people almost exactly a month ago after the first technician came and told us that we'd need to get a new cable laid coming into the property. They told us back then that they needed to get council permits to dig up the footpath, which was why it would take 4 weeks to get someone out here to do it. It sounded wrong at the time, and it's proven to be even more wrong now, because it has never been mentioned again. Now all they say is that it is a construction issue and has been passed up the chain - escalated, in the techno-speak they use to bamboozle suckers who haven't heard it all before - and will be dealt with directly. Directly, in this case, seems to suggest that there will be another day off work required from either me or my flatmate. Joy of joys. They once again promised that I would be hearing from managers. They said there would be red carpet rolled out and rose petals under my feet...I would bathe in champagne and be dressed in head to toe gold...or something just as likely to happen, in any case, if that wasn't the exact wording they used. I even got told that there was nobody higher the complaint could go to, and that the failure of the manager to return my calls after the weekend would be investigated by someone called Dan Pearce. Again, I'm somewhat skeptical. There is no evidence to date that makes me think any of what they have promised will actually happen. The real catch, though, is that there is no telephone complaints department. There is no other avenue for me to go down if I want a phone line, short of going and signing up for one of the other companies. And don't think I haven't looked into them. I have. I still am. It's just that my inner optimist keeps taking over and thinking that it surely can't go on any further, that three engineers' visits will surely do the trick, that next time they will return the call. For all that my reason tells me otherwise, I hope that somewhere out there is some Virgin employee who actually does their job, and does it well. I keep getting sucked in, in short. I am one of those suckers born every minute that a great circus impressario once spoke about, when it comes to trusting corporations.

So, Mr Branson, if you're out there, and you're real, and you want people not bitching about what is one of the flagship enterprises of your mammoth company now you've sold off the megastores, I suggest spending a little less time figuring out how to get people to the moon on a budget, and a little more trying to make it so that they can order in a pizza without running up a phone bill the size of an African country's GDP. Step away from the balloon for a moment, and look back at where your money comes from. Because if this keeps up, the cash will end someday. Even my stupid dumb optimism will only stretch so far before it snaps.

The Credit Crunch Who Stole Christmas

It's not enough to have to deal with the crap that Virgin Media are calling service right now. Oh no. Life just has to keep on throwing down the annoying bits and pieces that make you want to curl up and never deal with people ever again.

Anyone living under what has to be a disturbingly large boulder might not know that there is a global financial crisis at the moment, affectionately dubbed the Credit Crunch. Others might have heard it mentioned in the media once or twice. An hour. Every day. See, where there wasn't necessarily a whole load of panic when the sub-prime crisis hit American financial markets (mostly because people didn't understand it), it seems that being told more times a day than could ever be considered necessary that the economy is at risk of sliding into 'stagflation' (negative growth in all sectors except inflation, apparently) is enough to make the average punter sit up, take notice, and fear for their livelihood. I'm no different, although I do at least have the justification of being in a precarious industry, and pretty much on notice that my job is disappearing. Am I moping though? No. I'm in the process of finding something else is what I am. But this is the straw that broke the camel's back.

I've just been told by a reliable source that my company is one of many that is not having an annual Christmas party this year, because of the credit crunch. Not enough to have laid off half the company, further economies are required. That catch is, this is the time when a masive blow out is really needed. See, it's all very well to have the big party during the good times, celebrating being one of the lucky ones. But when there's not much else in the world to celebrate - economy turned to crap, wars all over the place, cold miserable weather, Virgin being incompetant - Christmas is a beacon of hope to many, the only thing that gets them through the deepest, darkest - in some cases literally - time of the year in the northern hemisphere. It's not a coincidence that the holiday season bings with it higher suicide rates than almost any other time of year.

So, in short, the media has a lot to answer for. I'm blaming them for raising awareness of the problems brought about by the American economic crisis. They have created a global problem, and now have some explaining to do. Or at the very least they ought to offer to fund Christmas parties for all the poor bunnies who wil have little enough to celebrate this year, thanks to their scaremongering.

The Ridiculous Virgin

Some might be aware that I moved to a new flat a couple of months back. Most of the problems that crop up when moving have been resolved since then. Most. But one last thing is lingering and growing more painful by the minute. We are still waiting for Virgin Media to pull their finger out and get around to supplying the services that we are currently paying for.

Getting a telephone connected to the flat has been an ongoing saga. First we tried to bring our old BT number with us. It seemed simple enough and they assured us that it would take a couple of days, once the former occupants of the flat cancelled their account which seemed to have been left open. Fair enough, we thought, and were reasonably content to have to wait the two weeks. Catch was, when they sent an engineer, he was not, at first, convinced that he was at the right flat. We insisted that the address we had given was right, so he changed the number. For the wrong flat. Our number was given to the flat upstairs. See, our flat doesn't even have a BT line. It took them 2 weeks to figure this out. Genius. So we decided that rather than wait the extra four weeks to get a BT line, we would cancel our account and go with Virgin, who we used for Broadband. And that was our second mistake.

At first, all seemed to go well. An installation tech came out, set up our TV, our phone and our new cable broadband for us using the existing cable. He was friendly, seemed to know what he was doing, and left us satisfied that everything was working. We seemed to have made the right choice, even if it did mean getting a new phone number. All went well for about a week. Then the phone went down. First it crackled, then it died completely. And the saga really began around about here.

You see, the departments at Virgin Media seem not to talk to each other. You call to report a fault, and they can send someone out within 2 weeks to take a look. That person may or may not be able to do more than tell you what you already know - that the fault is at their end, not yours. In our case, he could tell us that the cable bringing the service into our property was corroded through. And that the back up cable was also gone. Joy of joys. He set up a crew to come and replace the cable - an appointment that was 4 weeks away and suggested in the mean time that we keep trying in case others decided not to wait. Gee, I wonder why you wouldn't wait 4 weeks for a phone connection? The date for the new appointment fell on Saturday, sometime between 8 and 1, we were told.

Saturday dawned dark and wet. We got up at the unholy hour of 8, just to make sure that we weren't going to miss the call. Turns out, there was no way in hell that we'd have missed the banging on the door, because it never came. We saw the techs. They came to the gate, stood there for a moment, then turned and walked away. At 9am. Fair enough, we thought, maybe they need something else, as their van drove away. So we gave them until 1, as agreed, to come back and give us a phone. No. They never came back, and when we called - using our mobile, and running up an already enormous bill - we were told that they'd called the office at 12:40 saying something - the person at the other end couldn't figure out what it was either - was blocked, but that they'd be back later. Again, wrong. So come 3, we tried again, this time to be told that it had been referred to the construction department and that a manager would be calling us within the hour. Foolishly, going against evidence to date, we accepted this, if only to get us away from the Miley Cyrus/Duffy loop of hold music. Don't get me wrong, I used to like both of those songs, but hearing them repeat for about 2 hours in the course of one day is more than I can bear.

We waited. Again. No contact. So we once again took up our lovely non-Virgin mobiles at around 5 and dialed the 0845 number, choosing a random selection from the 4 options that come after about 3 minutes of hearing about Sky coming back to Virgin TV. Yes, I know, wonderful. Now please fix my phone. At least give me a date when you will fix it. November 18? I think not. So I launched into a rant. Now, I don't do this very often. I tend to think that the person at the other end of the phone is unlikely to respond well to out and out anger, but I was in a foul mood by now. I wanted my phone fixed, and I wanted it done that day. Except the construction management had gone home. There was nothing they could do. Except book me in for the 18 November. Which is a week day, meaning that either I or my flat mate would have to lose a day of work. Now my job is precarious thanks to the credit crunch, and my flatmate gets paid by the hour. Which of us would you like to take time out of the office, Mr Branson? But thanks for the reassurance that we won't be paying for the phone while it's not working. Just so we're clear here, we're not paying for ANY of it while it's not working, I think. It is possible to cancel a dirct debit at the bank, you know. I was promised that my complaint was being escalated, not just to the manager responsible, but to his manager, and that I would be hearing from them.

Now here I am, it's almost lunchtime on Monday morning and, what a surprise, I haven't heard a peep out of anyone. Google, however, has revealed at least one blog where someone got a response. So I'm hoping that the complaints people at Virgin are able to get their hands on this. If nothing else, I have their names. I can get their numbers, their postal addresses - hell, if I try hard enough, probably their home addresses, and I'm sure THEIR phone works just fine. Surely it's not a lot to ask. A phone line, without spending hours calling. Please. Anything so I don't have to hear the words 'Right, we've got four options for you' ever again.

Of bombs, plots and pyros

On November 5, there is nowhere in the world I'd rather be than London. Which makes it incredibly frustrating that I've spent most of the day out of London, in Glasgow for work.

In the UK, there is not another day of the year that comes close in terms of bangs and crashes. It is the day of commemorating the foiling of a plot to blow up the English parliament. Seems the Catholics weren't all that impressed with life under James I (James VI for the Scots out there) and planned to blow up not only the parliament, but pretty much the entire ruling class. Although there was a fairly large group of them, Guy Fawkes has remained the best known of the conspirators who planted gunpowder beneath the houses of parliament. And what better way to celebrate a failure of the gunpowder plot than blowing up everything? Poor Guy is burned in effigy once a year while fire works light up the sky and give the fire department their busiest day of the year. It's almost enough to make me understand why fire works are so restricted in Australia.

As I sit in my living room, being a sado and typing from the couch, I can hear a constant round of bangs. On the way back from the airport, there were flashes lighting up the sky. I couldn't always see the actual fireworks. Sometimes it was just the hint of light, like thunderstorms just over the horizon. It gave a hint of what the Blitz must have been like, but without the carnage, generally speaking. I think I might have said something similar before. The bombs dropping must have been terrifying, hearing the roar of the planes, the explosions getting closer. It's gives enough of a fright when there's fireworks on the round about 100m from my flat. I can't imagine what a series of bombs exploding on houses must have sounded like. Especially if you were in the house at the time.

Glasgow is no stranger to bombs more recently - or explosions of a type, anyway. It isn't that long since terrorists tried to blow up the Glasgow airport. Fortunately, all they succeeded in doing was driving a burning car into the terminal. Only part of the building was damaged. The airport has been partially closed off ever since while repair works were undertaken. I went through the terminal for the first time in months this week, and the change was enormous. Suddenly, Glasgow has a modern airport. Turns out, the terrorists did them a favour, in the end, with the new airport emerging, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old. Not only that, the old undamaged areas are now being refurbished as well. It seems that the English aren't the only ones able to salvage something good from terrorism...