Another day, another rejection letter. I now have enough of these to insulate the loft. Today’s was pretty sooky, ‘although I undoubtedly have much to offer’ they will not pursue my application any further and they ‘are sorry to give [me] this disappointing news at this time’. They also thank me for my interest three times. Count them. Three. It could be worse; I got one rejection letter that told me sternly that there were ‘other candidates who more fully fit the job criteria’, which I thought was pretty fucking rude. They might as well have told me I was shit and had done with it.
There was also a letter from the bank. Aw, you fucking bastard. My credit card payment bounced and they are charging me £35, plus £28 unauthorised overdraft fee. They don’t say what the thirty-five quid is for, it’s just some kind of generic fee I suppose. That means that the work I did on Friday, the money from that has gone straight to the bank. They did it again! There is a fiddle that the bank runs and it goes like this. When they take your money it happens instantly, a miracle of modern technology. But when you pay money in it takes up to five working days to clear. By this simple mechanism they fuck you.
‘Judas priest!’ I cry. ‘Forget you, you bunch of forgetful monkey-chuckers!’
I try not to swear in front of the kid, you see.
Well, this isn't happening again. I phone up my credit card and cancel the standing order for the minimum payment. The woman asks me if I have thought about insuring my cards against identity theft. I tell her that anyone can steal my identity if they really want it and good luck to them. If I am late with my credit card that costs me twelve quid, but the bank are waiting to sting me for nearly seventy. Twelve quid, thirty-five quid, these are serious amounts of money when you are unemployed, large enough to worry about, but small enough for you to actually do something about. The fact that if you add up my mortgage and everything I owe a horrendous sum of money, thousands of pounds, is of no consequence. It’s an astronomical figure, it might as well be a round £100,000, or a cool million, because there is absolutely nothing I can do about it right now. I might as well worry that the sun only has enough hydrogen fuel for another 5 billion years. It isn’t real, its the small numbers that get me worked up. I suppose that's where the banks fucked up in the first place.
That said, I would be even angrier about the sweaty, grasping hands of the bank if any of my tax had gone to bail the bank out, but I haven’t really paid any tax for about a year. I can rest easy knowing that the last time I paid any tax they just used it to buy bombs to drop on Afghanistan, so that’s all right.
I explain all this to the baby as I change her. She has been awake most of the night and now Lynne is getting some much-needed sleep. The baby has managed to poo right through all her clothes and bedding, so I am cleaning it up. I say ‘poo’ rather than ‘shit’ because, even though it smells pretty bad and I get it all over my hands, it isn’t really as offensive as my own faeces, and I have had occasion during my long and varied career to find that in some places that I hadn’t fully anticipated. No, ‘shit’ is too harsh a word. Even 'crap' doesn't convey it. 'Poo' is perfect. For the record, the poo started green at the beginning of the week, like pesto with hints of mustard, but has now settled into looking like carrot soup with crushed almonds in it.
So I tell the baby about the iniquities of the banking system. I tell her about money, the little tickets that everyone agrees are necessary for survival on this planet, and how nearly everyone is sick of this game, but everybody has been playing it for so long nobody knows what else to do. She doesn’t seem bothered, as soon as she is clean and in fresh clothes she falls asleep in my arms, pink and warm. I suppose she is right. It doesn’t really matter, does it?
