For those of you not on my personal journal's friendslist, I dropped a Hoegaarden Glass on my head yesterday (yes, I am that talented!) and am not feeling too fabulous. This has necessitated a drastic change of plans with regard to my posting schedule. I've been meaning to do the "why I am not a republican" post for three days now (note to American readers: republican in the "not wanting a monarchy" sense, not in the "votes for an oil-baronic-maniac" sense. I should have thought the latter would be sufficiently obvious without me having to explain it ;)), but my brain is not sufficiently cogent for me to formulate it right now. However, it will happen at some point, I promise.

Also, my eyes are tending to glaze over when I try to backread, which is a shame, because alixmortimer's post about education looks very interesting. This is a note to self to read it later.

There is a substantive point to this entry, though. The dear boy I spoke to at the Inland Revenue this morning, bless him, was really lovely. He was called John, and had a heavy Scouse accent. You see, my cheque cleared yesterday; the cheque from my ex which gives the final settlement to the end of our relationship. So, this morning, I rang the student loans company and paid off my student loan, emailed smile for a settlement figure for my personal loan, paid off my credit card, and emailed becky_spence to check that the figure she previously gave me to make my wedding dress still stands. Once all these payments have cleared, and assuming that Becky is still happy to proceed at the same amount, I will be left with the princely sum of £4.86 from my settlement.

None the less, even though I will not actually gain much money from this, I thought I had better ring the tax credit office at the Inland Revenue and let them know; I don't want to end up being chased for undeclared income, even though it's technically capital, not income. So, I navigated the labyrinthine "press 1 for x, 2 for y" system on the phone, and finally got through to the lovely John. My first clue that something was amiss came when I didn't get the usual barrage of security questions. He didn't even ask for my NI number. After a few preliminary pleasantries he admitted that he couldn't actually do anything today because his computer was down. Why is your computer down? I enquired. Because they're upgrading the system today he replied. They're not upgrading the security, by any chance, are they? I giggled. Yes he whispered, sorrowfully. He recommended I try again on Monday, and I wished him a good day and hoped that he didn't get too many annoying people demanding he do things that he couldn't do; he wished me a good day in return and I hung up.

Poor John, being lovely, on the sharp end of the HMRC's cock-ups, will be getting barrages of abuse from idiots at the moment. Having spent all of my working life in various positions of dealing with the general public, I can confidently state, from long years of empirical observation of a statistically significant sample of several thousand people, that most members of the general public are thick as pigshit and twice as objectionable. They seem to think that shouting at the poor powerless peon in front of them/on the other end of the phone, that this will achieve the impossible and get them what they want, even though the peon does not have the power to grant them their wish (much as they might wish they could, to get the objectionable idiots to shut up and go away). It reminds me of a song my daddy sings:

It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the rich what gets the gravy
Ain't it all a bleeding shame.

Poor old John is getting shouted at by idiots, probably even as I type, while the guy who resigned from the top of the HMRC (Paul Gray) has got a huge golden handshake. Does this leave a bad taste in anyone else's mouth?

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Vince Cable Watch

Vince was on the radio again this morning, being eloquent about the Northern Rock scandal. It's got to the point now where they don't even ask the guys from the other parties to comment, they just ask Vince. The man just gets better and better.

ETA: breaking news: Nick Clegg just stole a Vince Cable line on Any Questions on the radio, and didn't deliver it half as well - the one about pumping taxpayer's money into Northern Rock being the equivalent of 30 Millenium Domes, without even the benefit of a decent pop concert at the end of it, except that Nick stammered and said "I can't even remember how many Millennium Domes", which dulls the impact a little.

I have been meaning for a couple of days to have a rant about Peter Hain and his idiotic ideas for punishing cripples because they can't fight back fighting sickness benefit fraud. However, I'm late for work, and gominokouhai has already done it for me. So go read his entry. Several years experience of voluntary work at CAB tells me that the harder you make it to claim benefits, the higher the proportion of cheats, because people who actually ARE sick are not capable of jumping through all the ridiculous hoops that the DWP expects them to jump through to make a successful claim, whereas the fraudsters just fraud a bit harder.

* sigh *

Oh well, lets see what fresh cock-up today brings for Darling. That'll cheer me up.