The Mysterious Hospital Stay

Ok, so here's the deal, somewhere around beginning of Feb I was walking into town to go to ASDA, it was one of those rare snowy days nd while walking up the road, a piece of grit or snow got flicked up off the road and into my right eye. I didn't give it much thought, blinked a few times and got on with life, went to ASDA, got the stuff I needed, came home, cooked tea for me and my friends, went to bed and started a new day.

However, the following day, in the afternoon, my eye was itching quite badly, I left it alone, didn't wear my contact lenses and got on with the day, went to bed and started Wednesday with a building intense pain everytime I looked at something bright. I made an appointment to see my optician and soldiered on.

My optician diagnosed that I had a small corneal scratch and put me on some drops to help clear it up, 5 days later it still hadn't gone so I went to my GP who referred me to the hospital's emergency eye clinic.

The (first of many) doctor subsequently diagnosed the condition as iritis, put me on the appropriate antibiotic drops, sent me home with an appointment for a check up a week later.

I went back and saw another doctor who then declared that this wasn't iritis, it was a cold-sore in the eye and changed my medications to an ointment.

At first, when this all started, I noticed that the vision in my right eye had gone a fraction blurry and that there were a few halos around letters, this then got worse with the ointment but after consultation with the staff at the hospital, ointments will make your vision more hazy and the infection will cause blurriness. So far, i've seen my optician, my GP and two doctors at the eye clinic all with differing opinions.

The intense pain would come and go, this I found out was called Photo-Phobia and is caused by the iris spasming as it tries to synchronise with the good eye as it focuses.

I went back to the hospital on an emergency appointment between scheduled appointments to try and get the pain under control to no avail.

Finally on Monday of last week, I went for a scheduled check-up, actually feeling somewhat better and was told that I had 'pus' growing inside my eye as the infection had spread further through the cornea. I was admitted to hospital to get it under control and have spent the last week going insane laid in a sweaty hospital bed having drops poured into my eyes by, to be honest, what can only be described as some of the best care staff i've met.

People give the NHS a hard time but once you're in the system they do their best. I'm now under a single consultant who i've met on several occaisions, on the right antibiotics and antivirals and the 'pus' is decreasing in mass.

They've let me out of hospital today with a fork-lift truck full of medications to use and an appointment for Friday of this week to be re-checked. Fingers crossed that all will still be on the mend in a couple of days.

While in, i had to have a procedure called a corneal scrape - it's not a particularly pleasant sounding procedure but it's necessary to get rid of/collect dead cells for analysis. They do numb your eye first but it's a bit sore after that wears off.

Other highlights included an excess intake of ibuprofen and codeine tablets - and the subsequent having to come down from them, sleeping tablets called zopifloam and the bounceback effect they have during the day and becoming numb watching endless amounts of daytime TV and re-runs of the Professionals and Minder on ITV4!

The outlook is that when it all clears up there will still be some scarring of the cornea which will result in some further decreased vision in that eye (boo) and it could still take another 6 weeks to clear up.

One good thing - I manged to get my CVI (certificate of visual impairment) sorted out.

I'll post more after my appointment on Friday!

Does the government think we're really that stupid?

Ok, so today (thankfully) the voters had their day for democracy. The Manchester congestion charge got a big "no" vote sticking the middle finger firmly in the face of the city council.

So the proposal was to invest 2.8bn in Manchesters pretty messed up transit system (have you tried to use the Metrolink to get from Victory to Picadilly Station?) by imposing a five quid per day charge on motorists to cross the zone.

Five quid a day.... Doesn't sound that bad, London's managed to get it's up to eight so it wouldn't be long before Manchester would attempt the same but hey, hang on a minute, its not just for Manchester city centre (where the money would undoubtedly get spent in the most part) but it covers out as far as Bolton and surrounding Greater Manchester areas.

Right then, i'm a big fan of saying it like it is - this is just another tax on your job!!! no other way to put it, just an extra 1200 quid a year to pay out to go to work. Why? Because your boss isn't going to move the start and end of the day for you to avoid the peak hour charge and besides, it won't be long before it becomes all day anyway.

In theory the idea works perfectly - IF your work is city centre based but what, if like many office workers, you're on some godforsaken industrial estate on the rim of the city where public transport can't (and will never) go because it's uneconomical to install or upgrade the infrastructure and a loss leader to run.

So, 1200 quid a year per motorist into 2.8bn.... That's only 2.3million motorists per year passing through. Doesn't the area get that anyway so don't we only need this charge for 1 year to pay for it? I'd probably stomach that.

Will it decrease the overcrowding on the Clitheroe-Manchester or Bolton-Manchester train services? Nope, because this is operated by Northern and Transpenine Express who, thanks to Network Rail, have a cap on the number of carriages on the track at any one time.

Will it extend the Metrolink service to the fringes of the GM area? Probably not, this would involve a lot of road digging to put the tramlines back in which will cause delays due to roadwork signs with as usual no workers doing anything.

Will it decrease the number of cars on the road? Nope, drivers like the convenience of coming and going on their own timetable, not the supposedly scheduled timetable of the bus service which NEVER runs to time.

Will it make our lives any better? Nope, couriers will just start adding the charge disproportionately to your carriage charge when you ask for something to be delivered.

Congestion charge? Come on, rename it to what it is, a Convenience Charge!

Back to the plain facts. Remember I said it costs the average punter an extra 1200 quid a year from their ever diminishing wage packet? Yep, well, on the news this morning, it was quoted that the average wage was 15k per year in Manchester - maybe, but what about those who work in the GM area who's average wage is nearer to 12k?

Lets look at Mr [or Mrs/Ms/Miss] 15k first. 15k - Tax and NI at source leaves 11,500, minus the cost of going to work in a car (1200) is 10,300, minus rent at 600 per month (7200) is 3100 left to pay council tax, electric, water, gas, service charges and that's all before you even think about putting a morsel of food in your mouth.

That was only the 15k person, adjust that for the 12k worker and you're stuffed, not a penny left.

Again, this is government stupidity in the face of an economic crisis where people don't trust banks, energy companies are allowed to constantly increase charges to increase profits to shareholders and joblessness is increasing exponentially at the minute.

Thank god the democratic system worked and we got to say no to something for once.

My opinion: If the area needs more public transport, figure out the cost of doing it and increase council tax proportionately for a 3 year period. Based on the 2.8bn apparently needed, this would mean 9.3million per year spread across the 1.04million households is approx £8.94 per household per year - hell, multiply it up that's 26.82 one off payment in one year and we can have that 2.8bn public transport spend.

Why do we need to continually pay more for less?

Read the full official BBC report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7778110.stm

Annoying Phonecalls

So, how many of you get annoying phonecalls that no matter how much you tell the company you're not interested, they just won't stop calling? How many times do you get suspicious calls from companies who have your name but won't tell you who they are until you confirm all your private details to them?

I was getting tons of these and I found a solution so read on!

Call centres have finally figured out that all those "withheld" numbers get them nowhere as most people just hit voicemail or leave the phone to ring. So a lot have been taking advantage of the underuse of the new London 0203 number range, what's worse is they can buy a block of numbers so, say, 0203 024 85xx (so, 99 numbers) and then get their system to dial out with any othose as caller ID!

How annoying is that going to be.

What's worse is when you answer a number, you get silence for a second while their system finds an agent and pops all your details on their screen and they start blathering on about how much "debt you have on your account" - usually in pidgeon English.

I thought i'd try the nice approach at first and tried disowning myself from my mobile number to these people. I keep getting a call from this 0203 024 8537 number and the guy at the other end asks for me by name so I say he doesn't exist and the guy gets really aggressive saying "this is the number he has given me" so I ask "who are you?" to which he replies, "I cannot tell you that until I confirm that I am speaking to Mr XXXXXX". Well, fuck you Mr Johnny Foreigner call-centre worker! So I won't admit I am me and we get into a stalemate and I hang up and he calls back and I ignore and get very wound up and right now i'm suffering from enough stress!

I am a strong believer that you have the right to not speak to people if you don't want to. Your friends and family know if you're upset with them for good reason or you're just plain needing a break so they don't count in this but unsolicited calls are another thing and they can all go to hell.

I admit, that like most people, I have some trailing debt from my past and admittedly, i'm running out the clock on it because it's close enough to come off my file and I have no moral conscience about screwing over huge corporates and walking away from unsecured loans and cards. They're very nice to you when everything's rosey but the minute you hit a snag and you talk to them in advance they cut you off, close your account, send you to the collectors etc. I won't over justify but needless to say, you're a number in a database, there's no relationship, you're just a profit margin so they can all go to hell.

My point in all this is that they hound you on the phone and are very well trained to fast-talk at you to try and get you to agree to their 50 quid a month till it's paid solution (not telling you about the hidden annual admin charge) but I like to consider properly what's being said to me and anything said on the phone is very one sided in their favour (recordings of calls go missing uber frequently) so I prefer to use the written word.

I did try dealing with creditors and saying that when they write to me i'll write back but they send you a letter and call you a day later demanding a response (legall you can get upto 14 days to respond to any letter).

They just won't stop calling no matter what. And i've noticed they're calling earlier and later than would be classed as reasonable business (10:30pm I got a call the other night).

So, I started looking for a solution. To beat them at their own game. To cause them some distress.

I'm telecoms savvy and use VoIP termination for my landlines which means that with some clever software I can be called whereever I am in the world and it's only down to having a device logged onto the internet to get a call - no mobile roaming charges for me thank you!

My VoIP system is totally programable so I just added all their numbers to a list and they now get the doo-dah-dah rising tone so their auto diallers generally go away after a few calls.

But what about the mobile?

The Solution

Much as I love Linux, Windows is here as a mobile device operating system and I have an HTC-S620 (T-Mobile Dash) so I did some searching and found various bits of software that you can use for call filtering etc. I tried all of them out there. Some work, some don't even install on Windows Mobile 6.

The one I found to work the best was MagiCall by Mobiion.

You can download it here:
http://www.mobiion.com/magicall.html

It lets you set up rules for who can call you and can do various things but what we're most interested in is stopping pesky numbers calling us.

So I created a rule to block all unknown numbers (ie. withheld) and a (growing) list of other number I just plain don't want to speak to.

You can add numbers to it from either your contacts list, an SMS or your recent calls list.

The cool thing is it has two ways of disposing of the caller. Firstly you can just drop to voicemail any number you don't want so the caller just thinks your phone isn't on, or, to really piss off the call centres and cost them some money, use the pickup+drop option - this lets the line ring once (you don't hear it) and then answers and drops the call which will cost them a connect charge and at the rate their calling could amount up.

I say lets use this credit crunch our advantage.

What I want everyone who has the power to do it is use a piece of software like this to let these companies get so much phone charges that they can't continue or can't get anyone on the phone so bad they've got to lay off their staff. If anyone reading this works for a debt collection agency - tough, you chose a life of rejection and ill feeling.

Beat the system! You can if you want to!

Remember this though:

The chasers didn't pay the full amount for your account - so why should you!!!!!!!

Just one last thing, i'm not racist and i've made a few comments that might shock in this post. I don't have a problem doing business with anyone; white, orange, yellow, green, brown, blue or black calling me but will you please learn the language and its pronunciation properly before you start making calls and that applies equally to white british people who speak in a monotonistic drawl with the word "init" everywhere in a sentence!

Finally Bought The Apartment

Hey everyone, I finally completed on the apartment I was buying. It's a huge deal to me as it's been a very long process which has been stressfull, drawn out, nail biting and in several places nearly didn't happen.

I finally got the keys Tuesday 21st October so i'm now a mortgage payer in a global recession, however, thanks largely to two very good friends whom I will never forget, I only took out 80%!

I had to sign a disclaimer to not publicise the actual purchase value for a little while but suffice to say, in the current climate, I don't think either side did badly.

It's a complete empty shell which i've been after for ever so now starts the task of geekifying it.

Upgrades to be completed in the next two weeks:

• Kitchen modification to give me a cool breakfast bar/extra work surface island type fixture, fitted office (courtesy D&B Cabinets, Great Harwood, Blackburn, 01254 886712)
• Installation of hard-wired gigabit networking throughout (supplies courtesy of Edmundson Electical Ltd, Burnley, 01282 430310), floor channeling courtesy Steve Brown (general contractor extraordinaire)
• Carpets (courtesy of Regency Carpets, Bridge St, Darwen, Lancs)
• Floor Tiling in kitchen behind modification / Floor Tiling & Underfloor heating in bathrooms (courtesy Al Murad Tiling, Bolton Road, Blackburn, 01254 689377)
• Various cool fixtures and fittings (Ikea)

Well, that's it, i'll post more when we start work this weekend, the builders are still in doing some last bits of snag-list corrections.

Take care y'all!

You're ALL being robbed at work

I got an email the other day that was titled "your friends are stealing from you". I was shocked and curious enough to read the article which basically talked about friends stealing your time constantly when you're trying to run a business. Now, don't get me wrong, we all love to help our friends out and anyone who understands that you might be able to drop everything to help them out is a good friend but it made me consider the point about the way that most of us work and have to tolerate certain things in our careers.

Let me put it another way, have you ever stopped to consider your true hourly rate?

I caught up with a friend last week who was in the process of changing jobs because he was sick of the lack of flexibility his boss had over his daily commute.

He works in the city centre (Manchester) and lives away from there because, well, lets face it, it's a hell of a lot cheaper. His daily commute is by train and takes approximately 50 minutes from where he lives.

His boss is the sort that would fire you for turning up late by a minute but is the first to support the idea of finishing early on a friday and attendance at the pub for several rounds is compulsory so my friend has to be at the office before the prescribed starting time.

It's interesting to note here that the official time to be at the office is 30 minutes before anyone starts work so why does he have to be there? A question i've still yet to get answered by some companies.

If my friend caught the train he would like to catch and be at the office by 8:30am, well, put simply.... he can't! Why? Because the train arrives in the city centre at 8:27 and it's 5 mins walk to the office which then results in the boss bumping his gums all day and given unachievable targets because he's not on time for the what the boss did last night that he thinks is funny but nobody else does anecdote.

So, like the rest of you, he catches the train before that and gets into the city 35 mins ahead of schedule where he has no reason to do and sits in the office doorway waiting for someone with keys to arrive.

Which got me to thinking that his boss is effectively forcing him to give an extra 35 minutes a day to the company for which he receives no payment - all in the name of being "salaried".

I did some calculations: 35 minutes a day, 5 days a week which is 2 hours 55 minutes a week extra or over a 49 week year, 142 hours and 55 minutes which he gives to the company for free because his boss won't give him a few minutes grace to walk from the train station. Why not? They don't start work till 9:00am so he's effectively still arriving 28 minutes early if he catches the later train.

All this accumulates out of our own personal time - time which is precious no matter what we do or what our marital status is and we work the longest hours potentially in the world - so why shouldn't we be properly paid for it????

I worked this out on his salary. He's effectively contracted from 8:30am to 5:30pm with 30 minutes for lunch so, an 8.5hour day. Again, we'll use the 49 week (15 working days off) model based on £18,000 basic salary. So, his normal hourly rate is £8.64 per hour.

Doesn't sound bad does it, right, lets add on that bit the boss is really forcing him to work unpaid. Oh look, he now really is giving 9 hours and 5 minutes a day which works out at £8.09 per hour.

Hang on a minute, didn't I just get a salary drop there effectively? No really, you're just giving away time but lets convert that to how much you're being robbed by.....

In this case... (drum roll please)...... £1,220.54!

OUCH!

And that's before the government takes a chunk of it away to give to bankers who screwed up or pay for wars we don't want.

Now, take into account other costs which we self-employed call the cost of doing business - in this case, train fare or petrol.

He spends £39 per week on a rail ticket that gives him a saving of 1 journey per week. So, that's £1,911 per year he has to spend out of what's left AFTER TAXATION!

Let's make it more grim, 18,000 less tax and NI is approx £13,500, less train fare becomes £11,589, less rent and bills of approx £850 per month = £1,389 (or £26.71 per week) to himself a year.

WHY ARE WE TOLERATING THIS!

So, anyone who works two jobs (which a lot do) should apply for self-assessment tax. It's simple enough to set up, simple to keep the records for, you have things you can offset (cost of doing business), reduce your tax bill and gain a few quid legitimately back in your pocket.

Utopian idea? HMRC have no problem with it so long as you can justify your circumstances initially. It's just that bosses like the "all that I own" statistic to look at and brag with their friends about at the country club while drink £200/bottle champagne and smoking expensive cigars, "oh yes, I have 300 people working for me nowadays".

I'm a strong believer that salaried and PAYE work at all levels is grossly unfair on the worker. How many employment contracts do you see that say (roughly speaking) "8 hours per day or until the job is done". The bigger the company, the more they get away with! If you took on a work to rule attitude of not doing company work in that extra 30-50 minutes you're in the office for you'd soon be in the office with the door closed for a disciplinary meeting.

If you work an hour, get paid for an hour, if you work half an hour, get paid for half an hour. It's a lot fairer!

There's only one advantage to salaried work...... Credit applications - which at the current financial state you might as well forget anyway.

There are a few flaws to this way of working, for example, the work-shy layabouts who'll put down 10 hours a day and bunk off to the pub but isn't that why companies spend huge amounts of money on time and attendance systems that use your fingerprint to clock in and out with?

Just bear all of this in mind when you next negotiate your salary or job description with a new employer. Make sure you're getting a fair deal.

I don't for a minute think this will change the world but take into account the knock on effect. You catch the earlier train which means you have to get up earlier which in turn means you have to go to bed earlier which reduces the amount of "you" time to about 3 hours a day or less depending on how long your commute is.

Get your bosses told! If you want me in the office 30 minutes before work starts.... Well, in the words of Paulie from Goodfellas.... F**k you! Pay me!

Apartment Pics

Here's some pictures of the apartment i'm buying, click on a thumbnail for a larger version:



I'll post more as I get them!

Apartment

Ok, so to those that know me personally this isn't news but i've decided to get out of the rental housing situation while it's still possible.

I'm currently on a 12-month lease contract with my landlords, a very nice couple indeed. However, my rent will undoubtedly go up in January at renewal point and i'll still be stuck on an estate as a single guy with no kids surrounded by curtain twitching families who tut-tut enviously at me for having a life still at 34 - oh, an not being allowed to hang pictures on my walls, redecorate or upgrade the kitchen.

By January of 2009, head honcho's at financial institutions will, I suspect be jumping out of their high-floor windows in London because they are, themselves, going bankrupt due to the increasing number of properties they reposessed because people can't afford those 100% mortgages any more.

And just who's to blame? I'd like to point the finger of blame in one place only but realistically, both the banks and the borrowers. Come on, who in their right mind borrows 100% and up? And the lenders are blameless, it was a me-too culture to get business, who couldn't resist the temptation of little to no background checks, no deposit, move in yesterday, low fixed rate for 3 years and legal fees paid.

So, with the UK housing market in decline (casued by the banks themselves changing the lending policies on an almost daily basis) and builders and vendors alike discounting in desparation to offload their portfolio it seemed at least worth a bit of time to see if I could.

To put other readers in the picture, i'm 34, single, self-employed, had some credit problems in the last 6 years (who hasn't these days) and have set my heart on this dream, new-build apartment in a new development not from where I currently live.

Cutting several chapters down to size, yes! I can get a mortgage! BUT! At 80% loan-to-value. Why? Not specifically because i'm self-certified - oh no, because it's new build and it's an apartment. Apparently that's a bigger risk to the lenders than a pre-war falling-to-bits, roof-crumbling two-up, two-down mid-terraced with failing damp-course in a part of town that could be likened to Bhagdad on a bad day. Of course, the pro to that argument is that if it's been stood up for 50 years, it's very likely that it'll still be there in another 50.

No wonder the housing market is reported as being in decline, well, if I quote from an inside source in an estate agent, "we're not short of interested parties, it's just that viewings are dwindling because we have to warn people about policies in lending which lead to bigger deposits which people don't have". So, as one press outlet reported that year-on-year, house prices are falling by 4%. Just a minute, isn't that a bit strange, don't estate agents usually do the valuing for sale? And isn't that value derived from what they consider would be an expected price based on the current market?

I mean, take my old house I had a few years ago, I bought it for 35k held onto it for three and a half-years, my circumstances changed with my job and I needed to sell as it wasn't convenient to live there so I called in a local estate agent and they valued the place. Bearing in mind that I hadn't redecorated or done anything with it apart from installing gas-central-heating and converted the electric shower to mains-pressure in the process, he valued it at 69k and popped it on the market. I sold it for a little less as a cash-sale about 2 months later.

So, here I am, 3 years on from that and buying again, the place i'm getting is 1400+ square foot, penthouse in a maintained community with lift, balcony, very large open plan living space and three good sized bedrooms - asking price is a fair bit above the £150k mark.

To get the development to move, the builder is discounting and paying 5% deposit and that's where the fun starts with the mortgage providers, 95% is out, 90% is out too, 85% is ok but they won't do 5% deposit by builder so i'm at 80%, it's killing all my nice refurb budget and i'll be walking on the concrete floor for a while but I can do it - and then I get stitched up for stamp duty!

I mean, we pay about 80p in the pound in tax as it is so why do the government have a right to 1% of my purchase for nothing, to fund a war to protect oil interests that they will just put more duty on in a country that really was doing perfectly well without our Disney, Burgers and Cheese toting cousins opinion. I mean, America - now there's a country that I absolutely love, however, when it comes to foreign policy, they really are the government well known for giving you your own opinion and enforcing it rather than listening to yours.

I've got some pictures of the place which i'll post seperately and i'll keep this updated.