Because yet again I have been kicked in the teeth, this time it’s the government, more specifically the tax (credits) office. Somehow, despite giving them all the information they requested, they still managed to overpay my tax credits by nearly £380, which I now have to pay back. And even worse, because of my mobile phone mishap, I bought a new phone costing £110 on my card, and find that they have only paid me £46.47 this month, which will mean by the time I next get paid my wages, I will be at least £140 overdrawn, which isn’t good! All this has come about because I helped out Derrys and worked a shit-load of overtime over the Christmas period which bumped up my wages so much that the tax credits people overpaid me. Now I am stuck in the situation where I have been awarded £1016.38, minus £357.73, minus £164.58 (which is part of the overpayment to be paid back this year) which leaves me up shit creek without a paddle, only getting £495.07 over the coming ten months to 5th April 2007. The problem now is that this year my wages will fall far short of what I earned last year because of cutbacks within Derrys, there has been an overtime ban put in place unless it’s absolutely necessary. Basically I won’t be able to have a life for the next six weeks minimum, as things stand, I don’t actually have any money to buy food, so I have no option to go even deeper into the red! But I will simply have to cut out going out and spending on non-essentials, and definitely stop spending out on extravagancies like buying movie, music and gadgets, seems like my PC upgrade plans have been put on hold indefinitely as well I am going to ask about Derrys taking me on full time, or else I may have no option but to quit my job and find a full time job elsewhere as I really don’t want to be living on the breadline. That’s why I wanted to get back into employment so badly, and the idea of working tax credits pushed me towards taking a thirty hours per week job, basically I am earning £625-ish per month including working tax credits now, which is almost like living on the dole when you consider all the bills I have to pay, if I was on the dole at least I would have my council tax and rent paid for me, after paying my bills and groceries I basically have about £100 per month to live on; what do I have to do to get ahead in this world? Seems that every time I think things are going my way, someone else steps up and kicks me in the teeth!
Right the phone then, it’s a Samsung SGH-D500, which is a sliding style phone, it does have a music player, but only has 96MB of embedded memory, which is non-expandable, so its not practical to use a music player as the only way to connect it to the computer is through Bluetooth, which will require a Bluetooth dongle thingy, which costs money, which is a precious commodity at the moment as you can see from above. The phone seems pretty good overall, better camera, better display; I can actually see what the hell is going on in bright sunlight, something that wasn’t true of the ROKR E1 despite what Motorola claimed that met with the aforementioned water incident, hence the purchase of the Samsung. Anyway, if you want to see the new phone, take a look here, not bad for £100, yes I know I said £110 earlier, but I couldn’t buy the phone without taking £10 airtime credit, which will probably never get used as it was added to the PAYG sim card, which is redundant really as I am using the contract sim from Orange, guess it could be useful in an emergency situation!