I have been trying to reorganise my finances again.
Mark’s credit card company have been doing an offer of nought percent interest for a year on cash transfers to the bank.
He is out at work all day at the moment and so the credit card is in my hands.
I thought this sounded like a good idea, and that I might transfer enough cash into the current account to cover all of our bills for the next few months. In this way I would just need to shove money at the credit card whenever we had any, and not have loads of school fees and mortgages and weekly stomach-churning anxiety about whether or not we would be able to pay things. That way I would not need to worry, and we could pay off the shortfall over the summer when we are earning some money.
Of course it never works like that and instead of paying the credit cards I expect I would just recklessly splash money at all sorts of nice things, especially since we are approaching the festive time of year, and then finish up with a huge credit card bill as well as school fees and the mortgage.
As it turned out it didn’t matter anyway, because when I went online to look at our credit card, it had a special Personal Notice on it that said: “This offer applies to everybody on the whole planet, except you, loser.”
I was not impressed with this, because we have got lots of space in the credit card. It is burning a spatial hole in my pocket.
I don’t want to spend money on the credit card because of the interest. The whole point of the cash transfer was that it was not especially interesting. Also there isn’t anything that I want to buy, except school fees and a mortgage, and you can’t do those on a credit card, and even if you could they could jolly well get lost because of the interest. I like my money dull.
Of course the whole thing took ages. This was not helped by my computer running very slowly, and whilst I was getting cross with it being too incompetent to tell me that I couldn’t have any money, I rang the Apple helpdesk to see if they could do anything about it.
The lady got inside my computer.
This was really jolly clever. She had a little red arrow on the screen, especially designed to be friendly and obvious in order to help idiots find lost things on their screen.
I pressed everything that she told me to, and we discovered that my computer had got stuck whilst downloading photographs from my telephone.
She restarted it, because I said that I would like to, and we discovered that it was busily downloading three thousand photographs.
I could not stop it then, in case I lost them or confused it, or something terrible happened.
We had a very similar problem about ten years ago, before we all had our own computers, and just shared a big family one. It didn’t matter what I tried to print out, it would only ever print pictures of My Little Pony.
I didn’t know very much about computers then. It took me almost a year to work out that Lucy had been downloading pictures to print. She hadn’t printed them, just sent them to the printer. When I finally found out how to look at the printer list I discovered that it had two hundred and sixty seven jobs waiting, and two hundred and sixty four of those were to print off pictures on My Little Pony.
I deleted them. Lucy was inconsolable.
The computer refused to do anything else at all for the entire day.
I popped back upstairs to look at it every now and again, but it was still puffing its way through the photographs.
I am going to have to delete half of them anyway.
I gave up on admin.
I did the ironing instead.
