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The Wonderful System

By way of a moan about the government in general, you might be interested in the state of the pension system these days. My mother was 60 on August 13th (which was a Wednesday). Two weeks later, her pension still hadn’t been paid. She started making angry calls. No one had a good explanation for this, except mutterings about ‘backlog’ and things not being ‘processed yet.’

She did finally get sent a giro for the first two weeks of her pension, last week. It should have been paid into the bank, but they seemed to be having trouble with this concept. It was dated from August 18th. Here’s the fun bit: she phoned to inquire what this meant, and they told her the pensions are only paid on a ‘from Monday’ basis, so since her birthday was on a Wednesday, she loses five days of pension simply because it didn’t fall on a Monday! (How much like an evil ‘save every penny we can get away with’ government plot does this sound?)
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I Need to Expose Myself

I’m still not in the greatest of moods. This ‘government scheme’ business is a big factor (hey, our government does nothing but scheme!). On balance, since the house move is so near now, I think I’m inclined to just opt out of the system. £50-odd a week isn’t nearly enough to justify the degree of control they can exert upon me.

So, I’m available for work! Presently, I’m collecting together a few decent writing samples and making a Web site for offering Web design services. I can write. I can do Web pages. Someone out there must have a use for me.

Now, about this Web site… considering the poor degree of link exposure I have, the traffic’s not so bad. But, you know, I’ve worked pretty hard on this site—I reckon it’s one of the better-designed blogs out there, and while some of the content might be considered boring, the same goes for every single blog I’ve ever read. This blog’s as good as anyone else’s, dammit.
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