My ecosse.net account appears to be down and I’m unable to contact their tech support to find out how long until this is corrected.

So please contact me via My_First_Name.My_Surname@mac.com – I’ll let you all know when ecosse.net’s up again.

Ecosse.net appears to be playing the game again. So feel free to get at me via the normal address.

I’ve had some issues with them as webhosts. Can anyone recommend a different **FREE** webhost? Or am I just plain greedy?

A phenomenon I’ve heard of before has just happened to me. A PFO email I received today said

Unfortunately it appears that you are a little too experienced for this role…

Duh, doesn’t that mean I am far and away good enough to do this job and so am an excellent candidate? Why are they annoying me and depriving themselves the chance of hiring someone who is very good at what they want? They’ve shot themselves in the foot and me in the, well, somewhere else with the same bullet. The only good thing I can see about this PFO is that they emailed it, thus avoiding delay and dead trees.

Still, other prospects are arising so maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. Also, compared to some things that dear friends are going through right now, I have nothing to complain about.

While perusing vacancies at my local JobCentre, I saw a one that made me laugh out loud and ask the staff if the advert was a practical joke.

An organisation was looking for a GANGA PERSON and willing to pay them £14 per hour. Was this organisation intending to pay more than I had earned per hour for someone to smoke weed? Alternatively, could I get rich imitating the holiest river in Hinduism?

Unfortunately not. ‘GANGA’ was a typo for ‘GANGER’, i.e. a team leader, managing a large team of ground workers on a big civil engineering project.

I believe I provided the JC staff with some amusement on a dreich Friday in what can be an utterly thankless job.

Yesterday I bought a four-week Lothian Buses bus pass. Nothing unremarkable in that – in fact the only remarkable thing is how long it’s taken me to get around to buying it.

I have to congratulate LB on making the process so simple. Within 5 minutes of entering their office, I emerged into Auld Reekie’s inclement climate clutching my brand-new, personalised, credit-card-sized pass.

I just wish I knew why I now appear to have a gold front tooth.

scary or what?

Also, I appear most of my grey hair seems to have reverted to a more youthful shade. Thanks for the miracle, LB!

It’s probably of no significance to anyone else but I’ve just received JobSeeker’s Allowance payments for the time I was unemployed and claiming this state benefit (28th August to 28th September). It makes a very welcome dent in my overdraft. I havd given up hope of receiving any benefit because I hadn’t heard anything about my claim since signing off.

I had tried phoning Worcester’s Department for Work and Pensions many times but never got through. Some time while I was away from the UK they introduced a ‘we don’t see anyone face-to-face’ policy, presumably to protect staff from physical attack from irate non-recipients. Even the JobCentre staff believed it was well-nigh impossible to contact the DWP office.

Whatever, it’s a welcome dent in my overdraft – or just under 9% of a new Apple laptop!

Two pleasant things happened today.

The first was meeting up with an ex-girlfriend’s son. I’ve known him since he was 4: he’s now pushing 20. I think that should make me feel old but it doesn’t. Anyway, we spent some time playing a biking game on one of his consoles before he took me for a spin on the back of his 500cc bike.

This was the first time I’ve travelled at over 100 mph on two wheels and possibly the first time I’ve travelled at over 100mph on any form of wheeled vehicle. 70mph was fine, so long as the acceleration to that speed was gentle. Above 80 mph, the wind (possibly the slipstream from his helmet) attempted to take my helmet from my head. Because of the chinstrap, this can’t happen, so the wind/slipstream effectively tried to blow me off the back of the bike.

Above 80mph I shut my eyes and tried not to scream.

The second was getting in mp3 format four Roy Harper records I previously only had on vinyl. The vinyl is in my parent’s loft and I obtained Roy’s permission to record them to mp3 to put on an iPod to take to India. I didn’t do this, partly because I didn’t want to take another piece of technology and alienate my hosts even more, partly because I was afraid of it getting stolen, partly because I ran out of time to install and trouble-shoot the kit and software I’d need to do the recording and partly because I found better things to do with the money I’d have spent on the iPod. Since the mp3s came from a BitTorrent source and so are well dodgy, what amount of royalty do you think I owe Mr Harper and his record company?

Whatever, it’s beyond comparison to revisit a host of other songs and poems that informed and entertained me in my twenties. Goose-pimples are forming and deforming as the beauty of ‘Commune’ surrounds me.

These pleasant things tend to balance the PFO letters I received today.

Commune – Roy Harper

I was cackling over my new riches. Ahem!

I’ve just received this month’s cellphone bill. The normal charges were minimal, as I expected. However there was a significant amount of charges for calls I received on 17th August. Gaah! It’s exactly two months since I received those calls.

For the avoidance of doubt, my gripe is with my cellphone provider and the Indonesian phone company for not billing me for these calls last month, not with the caller(s).

This knocks my DWP riches down to 6% of that laptop.

Just received a PFO letter. Nothing new in that, for me or for the rest of the world, but it was for a job in which I was quite interested and had performed reasonably well at the interview. I’d have been more interested had the job been permanent and/or in Edinburgh (rather than Glasgow) and the interview was good experience, so it’s not a total loss.

However, I do feel a little deflated. This was probably exacerbated by receiving another PFO letter in the same post. I had been pretty confident of getting an interview so I wonder what I said that they didn’t like.

Back to the grind….

Yesterday I worked again for the well-known removals company. Some of the work was easy (sitting drinking tea while waiting for a driver who had overslept to arrive, tidying the store when the dispatcher got fed with paying me to do nothing) but there was enough back-ache and bullshit to make it overall a much less than satisfactory way of earning money.

I’m quite pleased that the minimum wage has just been raised to £5·35 per hour. It’s made me £2·70 better off!