8:45am

bank calling me about how i’ll be paying my loan back everymonth and again i could not give them an answer as i’m working with minus figures.   i have to speak to payplan, ccs or the citizens advice bureau again - the bank has given me 7 days for one of these three to arrange a payment plan.  i have been given a fax number to send in my suggestion of how much i can afford i guess.   trying to find work, do all this paperwork and be creative is taking quite the toll on my grey matter.  i’ll push through thou.

you might not know this depending on how well your initial interview went in the job centre.  If you were in professional job previous (it seems) you do have access to a £300 fund which is based on the discretion of the advisor that you see.  this fund is basically money for your first ‘back to work’ job interview and you can get things that you will need to be able to do that job/interview effectively.   i asked if it could go towards providing me with a new suit and they said that was fine.    Quite a confidence booster to go back into the work wearing something sharp.

So one of the suggestions i had from the job centre is to keep my income support seperate in another account so that other bills and direct debits do not eat up any funds that i get from the government.    You have to request a personal invitation document from the local job centre which is a letter that you have to take to your local post office - then two weeks later you should receive a card for drawing money from the post office account and you can have your income support paid into this account instead of your bank accounts.   You have to use this letter within 6 months.   A useful thing to have.

So in true ‘government don’t let me down’ fashion they did.   I was half expecting that the dole would go wrong this week.  i’ve been paid nothing.  not the first week they said i would.   i have to do the chasing via various numbers to find out what the problem was which was a ‘failsafe’ so that it never oversent money.  while i totally respect and understand this i knew as soon as i told them on tuesday it would go wrong.   see the problem with government and big business is those little nuggets of potential fixes never get communicated back up the chain.  it’s all firefighting an out of date system.   so i’m outta of cash completely.  i’m having to borrow some money for electric and i think i have food for a few weeks or so in the freezer.

Puts a bit of a delay on all the things i mentioned yesterday, so i’m back to job hunting and sending my CV out to various places like an automated job spammer.   why in the 21st century do some places insist on having to send you a paper form to fill in over and over again.  surely now we have systems in place to be able to do this - if we fed that into the social media matrix as well i’d probably have a job by now.

I did get some assistance from the state this morning however.   I got my free prescription for my inhalers.  had a terrible night sleep again because of this chest infection that i picked up from ella having a cough.   i’m sorta surfing in a virtual world between living and staring at life go by behind a glass where nobody can hear me shouting.

I’m pretty much allowing all this to wash over me thou.   these things in life are sent to test us and make us accountable for our actions - i’d like to clear some debt of and give my daughter the life she deserves.   i’m sure it’s coming, just wish it would hurry up.    Oh, btw notice posterous now does custom themes (+ tumblr themes) and i like the feature that allows anybody you allow (you add their email) to post stuff to your blog.

Does tumblr allow you to do that? - that would be very useful to give out the email address for people to send in their gripes/feelings/outlooks on what it is like for them to be unemployed.   I’m sure there is a wealth of information of things that are happening to people that are not getting captured.   Some just stupid situations that could if they were fixed allow someone to work.

It’s not all doom and gloom thou, looks like i might be doing some social media work in the near future after a few emails and might be able to get rezpondr back on track.   I’m just having a blip period i guess.   When i do have some cash i do intend to go and geo-tag businesses for flickr in burton next week and start to design a mashup around that - like a visual directory - with audioboo comments and stuff.

I’m going to use this little blog as a spouting off point from time to time, how i fixed things and how things are getting in my way - not just for an outlet for people who on the dole and do not want to be.  today is one of those days.

Three things stopped me yesterday doing what i needed to do - and all of them involved money.   I’m currently £24 overdrawn in my main bank account - when i do get one week of dole tomorrow it will eat into that £64.   that in itself i can handle but 3 seperate situations sum all the bad vibe of being in this mindspace for me.

• i have a problem taking images on my iphone that they do not show up on the film reel - mainly using shakeitphoto (nightcamera seems ok weirdly) @mackney has suggested a fix for this but i need to pay the paltry £1.19 for the app.  i don’t even have that.  this will therefore nag away in my head until i can get it sorted and get to the pictures i have taken (sure i can get to them from doing a direct link but i can’t do the fix) - not a major thing.

• i shot some video while in dubai on a project, when i get back turns out that my hv20 tape mechanism is now broken.   i had already broken it regarding sound in sxsw this year but now the unit has become a really expensive webcam.  sigh.  so at some point i need to invest in a new HD camera.   looking around the house of things to put on ebay using isale5.

• i needed to copy some videos for a potential project for a client into a dropbox, grab some videos from another persons dropbox and could do neither, i cannot afford the $9.99 to keep my 50gb dropbox going.  it says i’m 1024% over my allocation.   this actually stops me from getting a job and made me feel and idiot.  coming to something when you cannot afford the ‘tech’ basics.

Now, i know what some of you are going to say in that these are just my expenses, all involve money in some way and that i’m being selfish.  maybe, but i also see it as that whenever i’m in a dark place earning very little and generally feeling down in the dumps trouble seems to follow you everywhere.  it’s not just the feeling of being on the dole that is annoying it is that everything else seems compounded by it when you are.   things that were once in reach are pushed to the end of the virtual table.   In some ways (and i always use this as a base) this is a good thing for me to value what i have and need and be more optimized about spending.

It’s just my often self created ‘sod’s law’ that seems to love to kick me repeatedly when i’m down.   I’m gradually putting together a monthly expenses report together - i had become quite flippant on that over the past year of course but that was only because i was letting my creative side run riot.  for as good as i multitask on a computer when it comes to finances i really need to have a reboot.   whining over.

i looked on worktrain website today.  i’m seriously thinking about taking absolutely any jobs now.  you know the economy is bad when you cannot even get a shelf stacking job at your local sainsburys.

when you have no contract and no income coming in some phone calls can seem highly entertaining especially when your working with minus numbers - but on the flipside those doors for agreements that never existed before when you had money soon swing open.   if i had some of these agreements now available to me when i have little money coming in would i be in the situation i’m in now? - i think not.   I recently was allowed to switch to interest only payments on my mortgage, if that facility was allowed to me six months back i could have paid off my credit card and never used it again.   lessons learnt.   my shockingly bad with money.  lessons to learn.  keep it simple, do it quickly and keep motivated.  that is my new daily karma, well that and walking.

just having a moment of pacing up and down thinking about jobs and future and am annoyed that my general lack of business and accounting skills puts me in such depressing situations.   lots of my web stuff accounts are closing or getting shut down because i cannot pay the bills.  even my dropbox $10 i cannot afford right now.  that’s pretty lame.   I’m actually starting to believe that i need to *move* from where i live right now.

I wish that we never had this house/mortgage over our heads.   In a catch22 where i wish we had cash to do it up and stick it on the market.   Then i could purchase a car/van/truck and live bouncing around creating media and building up geo business stuff ideas i have.    Once i get my dole this week i’ll be heading into the local burton town to start on that however so that is something to look forward too.

So the job i just did was for raising money for charity and as such i was not paid for my work - the expenses of the trip was covered by the company that was working with the brand.   Today, i had to go and ‘sign’ on - the number one dread for me as mr doledestroying.   i really hate it, it’s ‘soledestroying’ - the staff are always nice but it is like each chair has it’s own custom dark grey rain cloud hovering overhead.

So today, being the honest sole that i am on things like this (after all i need to live and £64 gets you nothing these days) i told them about the trip - after all not telling them might be worse right?

Looks like i’ll probably lose out on 3/4 days dole pay because i was out of the country and i never let them know (was pretty much last minute) so we wrote out a statement and we have to post that off for a panel to review my actions.   seems so hard these days to do the right thing.    A few things i want to get out of note.

• i was not paid for my time producing content
• all expenses for flights and hotels were covered by company involved in organizing
• it was last minute so i did not update anyone about going (job centre - my bad)
• it’s probably going to be treated in that i was not looking for work.

I’m guessing that this situation ever rarely happens - a weird extreme case of raising money for charities from 2 different locations (6 in total from 3 in team) where i actually lose out.   I wanted to document this experience thou.   I think it is a good wake up call for adding an additional section for someone jobless that if they do charity work and also at the same time use social media so people can see their work first hand before making a decision about if they are useful for a job or team or not.    In directly sometimes producing social media does that.

Just for once i hope they make the right decision on this and realise that indirect i was doing three fold - i was actively extending my own social network, promoting nokia products and raising money for charity.    It’s a strange world sometimes.

So, i’m back from a trip that was all funded by the organizer so i never got paid or received any money from it and today i’m back into the job centre to stare at a lady willing her to find me something to do in computers and to prove that i actually care about getting another job so the government can release £64 to me into my bank account - the one that will probably swallow up that £64 to bank charges.

this is the world of the doledestroying.  the collection and signing of money infront of a squadron of people that do not want to work because they think the system can supply them free cash.   but for the ones that want to work it simply strips away at our very soul and makes us feel like beggers.