The Weblog Review gave me a positive review, which is what I need after all the financial crap this morning. They don’t like the background colour, which is fair, it’s about time for a change anyway.

Macquaria A cool new use for old computer boxes. Though old MAc Classics were quite small, I couldn’t see you getting many fish into one.

My ‘unclutter my life’ campaign continues, with stuff on EBay as I line it up for sale. There’ll be more tonight, and in a few days time and……

It gets better. I just tried to claim payment protection- which I’ve been paying for on my loan repayments- for the period I was unemployed. Because I was a temporary, I’m not eligible. I was in that job for four years, a better, more productive (and more sarcastic) employee than most of the permanent staff. I was shafted out of over two grand of payments on the relocation (Council Tax and insurance when my bikes were stolen) that they verbally promised then denied [they claimed that even permanent staff didn’t get those payments, but when a perm I knew went down to the same department she had everything but the phone bill covered], I couldn’t get in on the sharesave and there was no pension scheme. And now Egg tell me that, far from being sensible in taking out payment protection, I was actually being fleeced when they sold me the plan (though they didn’t sell me it, because I selected it when it was recommended in my online application.)

You can tell I’m pissed off, I’d never used italics before these last two posts.

Never ever, under any circumstances, tell the Benefits Agency the truth. They say they want the truth, but getting it just screws their whole delicately balanced, generally useless system. I feel like Jack Nicholson, hissing out, “You can’t handle the Truth.”

Yes, nearly five months after signing on, and four weeks after finding a new job, I still haven’t received any Housing Benefit. The reason- I actually admitted that I wasn’t going to turn into a daytime TV watching vegetable and would devote the time I wasn’t jobhunting toward projects that might, one day, pay out.