Posted in May 2008

29th May - I'm still here

Source: knightrider45
Tuesday 27th May 2008, 3:25pm

And I've kept the house for another month!

But that's only after talking to the lenders who declined an initial offer - and referred it to their solicitors - who accepted it and referred it back to the lenders who, eventually accepted it as well.

As that new TV ad goes, today's a new day. Forget about yesterday. So, we start over again.

Thanks to Bluerhino for his reply to my previous post. Nice to "meet" you. What you suggest is what I'm sort of trying to do. But the house will never be sold - firstly because it would break the wife's heart, and secondly, being selfish, I really couldn't face dealing with mortgages again. Ever.

My wife does work part time, and it's in a factory, but she can only do one day at a time because of her severe back problems. Ideally, she shouldn't be working at all. I've looked at HGV training for working my days off - I've worked out that I can earn a weeks wages if I was to go "tramping" - staying out on the road from Friday afternoons to Monday mornings. But, like everything else, I have to pay for training. And the cost of this, two week course, is £2,100 + accommodation + food.

A pipedream.

Especially as I can't get vocational funding from the Government - the only grant I could get is £30 a week. So that idea's shot through as well. Don't get me wrong - I hate driving, as anyone who knows me will tell you - but I'd have done HGV agency work for a couple a couple of years to help pull us straight. I'm still £12,000 short on running the household every year. And that's got to change.

The car nows uses £8.00 petrol a day - up from £5.00 three or four months ago - and the heating oil has now doubled, literally, in 6 months. So now I'm paying close on £400 for 500 litres - last October it was under £200.

So, once again it's back to the business to survive. I'm partially qualified in PC repairs, and going back to Bluerhino's reply, I guess this is what I'm going to have to use, on a physical basis, to bring in extra cash. The ebay business is still taking off, fortunately, though it's not making a lot at the moment - so the plan - or structure (thanks for that excellent word Bluerhino) is to work really hard on building the business up as well as doing as much overtime as I can as well.

Talking of overtime, my company's complained because they say I'm working too much - I've recently done 9 x 12 hour nights, two off, now in the middle of another 7 nights, I've got 24 hours off from Thursday morning at 7am, back at work for a day shift on Friday, then nights again for 5 shifts starting from Saturday.

For the last four weeks, I've worked a minumum of 84 hours (plus travelling)every week - I think I've actually topped 102 hours one week. No prizes for guessing why I'm so tired and worn out then, is there?

But, it will get better. Especially now that repo order for the house isn't going to happen. Well, not just yet, anyway!

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Something's Got To Give

Source: knightrider45
Monday 12th May 2008, 8:15am

Nothing changes does it, really?

Every day I'm hounded by people chasing me for money. By phone and door knocking. And I'm getting really, really peed off with it all.

Every day another call (or 3). Another agreement.And it just goes on and on and on. And if Sky ring me once more they're going to get the phone rammed somewhere which is distinctly uncomfortable.

My wife chose me over a stable, comfortable life. All I've done, seemingly, is taken her deeper and deeper in a world of debt, despair and hopelessness.

Okay, there's been 27,539 repossession orders this year nationwide. I've kept my house. So that makes me better than 27,539 other people. But only just. And that's by the skin of my teeth. This month, it might be a different story. Again.

It seems as if I'm constantly fighting to stay still. Fending off phone callers and people. Deciding what I must pay this month (with the help of a baliff), and what I can't pay.

I just can't seem to earn enough to feed all the vultures constantly circling around me. My P60 shows that I earned just over £22,000 last year - but the house costs £34,000 a year to run, which includes everything imaginable. And £500 emergency bank balance for boiler/car/other house breakdown and repairs.

I'm losing all sense of structure, of control, of reasoning. Prices and taxes go up on a daily basis, my wages stay still. And this is just cost of living.

As a family, besides the mortgage, we don't have any credit cards, credit agreements, loans, HP or anything. I'm struggling, both with how things are, and trying not to simply give it all in, to give up.

A man at work's had to have a management interview because he keeps losing his temper. Turns out he owes £220,000 on a mortgage and a further £20,000 on credit cards. And he earns less than me. As he loses control of his life, he loses control of his behaviour.

I can't earn enough to live. But, if I had a credit card, I wouldn't have a single problem whatsoever. But I can't get a credit card - not that I'd have one anyway. It will just mean another bill, phone call, visitor, or court summons.

So, I'll just keep struggling on. But what makes everything worse is that it involves my wife and kids as well. And that, alone, is something I really struggle to deal with.

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Accident!!

Source: knightrider45
Sunday 11th May 2008, 8:15am

Steve is a lorry driver based at Catterick. After he left my depot Friday night he was on his way back to his own depot travelling along the A1 just after Midnight Friday Night/Saturday Morning

A car had crashed into the middle crash barriers and had rebounded back out broadside across the carriageway.

The man, apparently, had got out of his car and walked across to the hard shoulder. Leaving his car on the unlit carriageway without lights.

Steve, driving his 44 tonne loaded lorry saw the car at the last minute and swerved to avoid it. At 50 mph, the sudden swerving overbalanced his loaded tank.

With the net result that both lorry and tank slid along the road, on their sides, for 100 paces. Cab was driver side down. The heat from the friction of the cab sliding along the road for so long at 50mph had started to weld the driver's door shut.

Steve missed smashing and scraping his head along the crash barrier by less than one inch as his cab roof caved in as it hit the road. But he has ended up in hospital, having an operation, as one of his cuts had gone through to the bone on his leg.

I cannot make any comment about the car at the moment because only that driver knows what really happened, and hopefully the Police over there will soon work it out. But what is known is that the car was the only vehicle on the road at the time of the crash, and the conditions were good, dry and with good visibility.

But what I will say is this: Steve is an ex squaddie of some 15 years standing, is an excellent, family orientated family, who works a minimum of 60 hours weekly to help keep his family's heads above water. He lives for, and because of, his family. And his life was nearly snubbed out as a result of this car being left in the middle of a dual carriageway.

The A1 ended up being closed off from half past midnight until eleven O'Clock Saturday morning, disrupting hundreds, if not thousands of people.

Oh, and did I say the car involved wasn't taxed?

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Bus Ride Snooker & Bob, Bob, The Trainer Man

Source: knightrider45
Thursday 8th May 2008, 8:33am

This post is not politically correct, but I have to share a couple of conversations I’ve had with friends through a long night shift, fighting both to stay awake as well as the effects of the (rapidly worsening) flu.

Firstly, the Bus Ride Snooker. I'll share my other conversation in a day or so, as both on the same blog would make it a really long one. My friend Graham, a lorry driver, used to be a bus driver years ago when the buses just started to change to the One Man Operated systems we see today.

One game the drivers and conductors used to play sometimes when they were bored was snooker. And they used to play it like this:

The overall objective was to get an unsuspecting passenger to sit in a nominated seat, by the driver using a combination of acceleration, clutch and steering, moving the bus in such a way that the innocent passenger takes his place in the nominated hot seat.

The skilled bus driver could get any passenger to sit wherever he wanted using this technique. The favourite one concerned middle aged passengers, loaded up with shopping bags. As the passenger boarded the bus and began walking down the aisle in between the seats, the bus driver could make that passenger walk fast, slow, forwards, backwards, or even get them to walk the entire length of the bus with a very strange gait, simply by controlling the buses movements.

If the driver had taken a particular dislike to a passenger, the passenger in question could be made to walk forwards, backwards, and forwards again, no end of times, before they actually got to sit down. And the effects were even more spectacular if the passenger was loaded down with lots of bags!

Pot Black involved the conductor standing next to a nominated seat, and the driver had to get the passenger to sit in it, just by using the buses movements. Bonuses would be awarded to the driver who had managed to pot the black by making the passenger sit in a particular seat, but who then promptly then got back up after sitting down in it to move to another seat, as this proved without a doubt that the passenger had only sat down as a result of the bus driver's skill and they hadn't actually intended to sit where they'd ended up.

And on really busy routes with lots of stops and passengers getting on and off, the game could be upgraded to billiards, depending on the skills of the bus driver, by using the buses movements to get passengers to bump into each other, thereby potting two shots in one by making both passengers sit down on different seats on each side of the bus.

But perhaps one of the most disturbing scenes in my minds eye is that of the on bus ballet sessions. As Graham worked in Yorkshire, a fair few of the passengers were miners.

Big, butch hairy men. But, Graham tells me, there was a particular bus driver who specialised in getting these men's men to do a wonderfully wicked gait along the bus, before making them sit down immediately after, and not until, they'd displayed their wonderfully skillful ballet movements along the seating aisle, ending with a quick, smart pirolette (sp?) as they began to sit down. I'm told that this effect was particularly successful if the passenger was loaded with various bags.

Just wouldn't happen today would it? Mainly because the suspension on today's buses is much improved over the old Bristol VR buses that had virtually no suspension. But, as well as that, today's PC (silly) climate would ensure it could never happen.

Well, the vision made my night go just a little bit quicker anyway!! And if only the passengers knew!!

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Caravanners take twice as long and inconvenience everyone doing it!

Source: knightrider45
Tuesday 6th May 2008, 5:41pm

Seemingly hundreds of caravans held me up last night on the way to work – making me wound up before I started

I left home earlier than normal because of those.....those.....people and, true to form, I was held up for about 25 minutes approaching the Knights Hill junction. A journey that takes me 22 minutes on a Sunday morning and 40 minutes on a weekday night last night took one hour three minutes.

Thank you caravanners, for making me late for work. Be a loser and tow a caravan! So, all told, I've now got to leave home at quarter to six for a seven O'clock start next Bank Holiday. Doesn't it stink?

I haven't been blogging for a couple of weeks because I'm sooooooooo busy, but there's not too much to mention anyway really, just work and sleeping.

I've secured (extra) overtime in May with the result that I'm now only having three nights off all through the month. This has put my market trading adventures on hold until June now - obviously it's better to work overtime at the job I really dispise rather than take unknown chances to make money on the market - see, that's responsibility talking again, instead of life, isn't it?

I just don't know what's happened to my sense of adventure, of life, of living on the edge. Am I really getting that old? Especially as one of the neighbours told the House Manager that she thought I was mid fifties the other day!! Hello, I'm only 43!!

Believe it or not, I still haven't managed to see my doctor yet - that's been what, 6 weeks or so? I'm going today (Tuesday), mainly because I've run out of the breathing tablets I use, and they're still off general sale so I've got to get a prescribed medicine now, and, secondly, because I've come down with this wicked chest/sore throat infection over the weekend, so I've got to get this sorted out as it's started to play havoc with my breathing.

So, nothing else to report really. The Teenage One's romance with First Proper Boyfriend (FPB) is still ongoing, as are my eBay adventures - I'm still selling an average of one (but almost two) books daily. I think I've really found my calling with publishing and rewriting books. Really enjoy it - and it means that I can shut myself off from the world, retreating into my own instead. Well, when I get time off from the Job anyway that is.

But the overall objective hasn't changed - I want to live and work in my own world, and to do this I must get the business up and running properly to support me financially.That, as well, would then allow me to argue the Family's arguments that "You're always on the computer", because when I get that, I could just log onto the bank and paypal accounts - and show them why I'm always on there.

But that's a long way off yet. But I'm working on getting there. Just like a caravanner I suppose!!

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