That’s what I want to call my album, which I’ll never make because I can’t make music. But if anyone comes up with something good enough and wants to call it that, let me know. Your people can talk to my people and we’ll come to some arrangement. It’s a good word.

Anyway, money matters. But before that – cold orange juice with ice cubes on a hot evening is WONDERFUL. This may be a post with a little asides all over the place. Just to warn you.

Yes, money matters. I’m not great with numbers. My brain struggles with numbers in the way that an over-steering terrier struggles with an icy lake whilst it chases ducks. As such, I don’t really budget in any real depth.
I work out vaguely how much I’ll spend on the major things – i.e. petrol, tolls, food, and the rest just seems to work itself out. Up to now this hasn’t really been a problem, because when I barely earned anything I barely spent anything, and the months before Christmas I was pretty much coming up even each month.

Mm-mm. Ice-cream & apple crumble. Delicious.

Anyway, at the start of the year, I bought myself a laptop, finished work, and then paid off a fairly sizeable loan, plus over a grand and a half for the OTHER courses I was going on. I still had plenty in reserve in my expenses account, which would comfortably pay for the first month of whatever next job I got (in terms of travelling, food, accommodation if necessary) and then I’d be getting paid so it wouldn’t matter.

Sounds good, right? Well it was, in theory, except I did everything in such a blasé way, that when I accepted a 1 month contract and said “Yeah, that’s fine” to a 30-day-payment clause, I wasn’t thinking of my finances.
By the end of that 1 month, I had a few hundred left in expenses, and precious little anywhere else. Then I accepted a job back at HP-CDS, a job which costs £180 a week just to commute to (and possibly even more if I stayed in a B&B). All of a sudden that “Yeah, that’s fine” seemed like a big mistake.

It’s all going to be fine – this Wednesday is 30 days on from my first invoice for that prior job, so I’ll be getting paid 2 weeks wages, then come the end of this month, there’ll be effectively 5 weeks worth of pay coming through. As long as nothing goes wrong (i.e. car breaking down) then it’s all good.

The moral of this whole story really is – budget properly, and keep an eye on your finances, no matter what you have going in and out. If you start properly when you’re not earning much, you’ll be much better placed once you’re earning serious money.

Whilst writing this, I reflected that I always feel a little guilty when writing/talking about work/money, because most people I know currently earn comparatively little or nothing at all (other than fellow contractors, who are milking the system more than I am probably). But then I think … fuck it, why should I feel that way?
Most of the time in school (when we are all at our most sensitive ) I pretty much lived each day with at least one person (who shall remain obvious) going on and on about how much money he made and how successful he or people in his life were.

I guess this is me getting my revenge on the world. Being successful, not a bad way of doing things I think

Of course, success is nothing if you have no-one to share it with, but that’s another story altogether …

This week (Monday to Wednesday) constituted the only overnight stay of the contract. In Llandrindod Wells to be precise, at the Metropole – a hotel that immediately invokes memories of the Addams Family theme tune as soon as you see it.

Llandod, as we called it (and as it shall henceforth be referred to), is not exactly the most exciting place in the world. Situated smack bang in the middle of Wales it is surrounded by a lot of very little. “The arse-end of nowhere” is how one of my colleagues eloquently described it, as we loitered outside the back of a deserted pub sipping on lager in the crisp and fresh evening air.

The actual work we were there for was much of a muchness, and even more of a boringness. One member of our team had headed up to Llandod earlier on the Monday and started setting everything up, so by Tuesday afternoon, we were all holed up in an interview room, tending to the occasional user query but otherwise doing very little. The lack of … anything in Llandod was driven home further, when we failed to find anywhere that sold men’s swimming shorts (we wanted to use the sauna/steam room at the hotel and they sold them for £20 (!)).

One positive thing that I got out of the trip was getting to try out another car. We got an 08 plate Ford Focus ‘Style’ for travelling to and from Llandod (it’s currently sat on my driveway to be returned tomorrow). As a 1.6 diesel, it was never going to be anything special, but we ragged the crap out of the thing and it was actually quite a fun car to drive, if only for the comedy/fear “will-we/won’t-we” factor when trying to overtake cars on the A470/A483.

It’s a very well-screwed-together car, the quality of the interior got no complaints from me and the steering was tight and direct with a good-sized steering wheel to hang onto. The only complaint I had was the gearbox, which was just shockingly bad, considering Ford’s reputation. I’ve driven five or six Ford vehicles from small cars through to Transit vans, and all have had a decent gear change. The Focus we had absolutely did not, and it was all the poorer for it.

The other story of the week is that some pikey bastards have stolen from me, and I am most definitely unhappy about it.

I ordered a t-shirt and polo shirt from Addict Clothing Co. on Saturday 12th and was a little unhappy to find that the goods had not arrived. I contacted Addict, who supplied a tracking number telling me that it had been delivered on the 15th.

Long story short (as this is already a fairly long entry), somebody has been (we think) following the postman around. Seeing him attempt to deliver a package and fail, this person fished the delivery slip out of our front letterbox (there are scratches on the door from however this took place) and then gave it to someone else (we have a vague description) who went to Caldicot to pick it up.

This is where the Post Office messed up badly, as they are supposed to ask for ID. But in this case they didn’t, meaning that some thieving pikey cow has sloped off with nearly £80 of merchandise, paid for by me.

The police have been informed and are looking into it, but it’s unclear as to where the ‘blame’ lies in terms of how I can get my money back/goods re-sent. Either way I am currently significantly out of pocket, very unhappy, and on the lookout for a scruffy-looking 5′8″ woman with mousey hair driving a blue saloon.

It’s nice to get parental advice on something that’s really bothering you. As I’ve gotten older and branched out into the current career I’m in now, the way I go about it has pretty much precluded my parents from offering much advice, simply because it’s not something they’re familiar with.

Last weekend I got something off my chest though, which was good.

I’d been struggling with the idea of asking for what to most people my age is a ridiculous amount of money to go back to HP-CDS, simply because I know that, if I were to get it, I’d be working alongside people that I respected and who were good at their jobs, yet who would be on a much lower rate than I.

This bothered me greatly, and I talked it out with my Dad. We eventually decided that in my case as a contractor, I should just go for whatever I can get out of any deal offered – after all, the companies I deal with won’t hesitate to ditch me if they should need to, so I may as well take what I can get and run with it. I guess I felt that by doing so, it would compromise my integrity as a person and regardless of what people think of me, I ultimately have to answer to myself.

I’m happier now, knowing that should I ask for – and get – a much higher rate, that I will simply be taking what is offered and reaping the reward for taking that chance/opportunity. After all, I am good at what I do and if people want to pay me a lot of money for it, I’d be an idiot not to take it.

Just as long as I don’t let that sort of attitude encroach onto personal matters – and I don’t think it would – then things’ll be fine

Speaking of which, I got a not-unexpected phone call yesterday to inform me that my current contract will be finishing next week, so either way I need to find some more work!!

Sunday can be a wonderful day. Often, it’s quiet, boring, and tinged with the horrific knowledge that tomorrow you will be getting up early to go back to work.

Today was a good day. I got up at a nice hour (i.e. 10am … ish), had a nice breakfast (i.e. bacon, eggs and beans on toast), chilled out nicely for an hour or so (i.e. watched 3 episodes of Scrubs), spent 5 hours doing something productive (i.e. going to work, finishing what we started on Friday and making £180 into the bargain), and now I’m at home, sipping a fine malt Whiskey with Coke (try as I might, I cannot drink it neat) and tapping away at my little home on the web whilst dinner cooks downstairs.

All in all, a pretty decent day it must be said.

I got a bit of a surprise today, whilst waiting in line for my Italian B.M.T. Subway roll. No, it wasn’t that the food looked really appetizing (after I decided that Subway was crap a few years back), rather it was the phonecall that interrupted my culinary musings.

The voice at the other end of the line was familiar to me, and so it should have been, as it was the recruitment agent that had offered me my previous role at HP-CDS. He had information that said I was out of work at present (long story, but I know how he got that impression); information which I quickly corrected. What followed did surprise me somewhat.

It turns out that he received a personal request from management to ‘get [me] to come back’. Actually I think the actual words used were “What rate will get you to come back?”
I ummed and errred for a few seconds before sensibly going for the “I’ll think about it and let you know” response. I’ll be speaking to him on Monday.

This is pretty big for me. I’ve only been contracting for a year, and working full-time for just over three, and yet here is an arm of a massive multinational IT company specifically asking for me, and what’s more asking me to name my price!!

I will be giving it some thought this weekend. The main reason I left was that I couldn’t really afford to live in the area, and they wouldn’t pay expenses. So the goal is to secure a high enough rate to make it worth my while, and also living expenses.

Whilst those of you reading this who are following the more conventional routes into jobs and still can’t wrap your heads around the concept of contracting may feel the urge to kick my teeth in for being such a jammy bastard, I can say this:

There is no magic ingredient, no secret handshake, no hidden network.

All I have ever done for any of my employers is work as hard as required, try and push my learning and understanding, get involved where necessary and be myself – which usually means getting on with – or trying to at the very least – as many people as I can.
I’m also good at my job. (I enjoy saying that, because I’m not the most confident of people.)

We’ll see where all this goes. If my price is too high, then fine. I can live with that – I want to be in Cardiff anyway. But if they’re fine with it, then fantastic. I can go back to a place I know well, where I can continue to improve my knowledge and experience, and make some damn good money at the same time.

I feel a little guilty, but only a tiny tiny little bit. Working again today, I got in at 7.55 and sat doing … nothing.

Literally nothing, all day.

It got so bad that we were told to just leave at 3pm. The best part is, I still get paid. Hey, I’m a contractor. My contract states that I work until the first week of May, so I just show up and wait to be told what to do. If nobody tells me to do anything, so be it!

Doing nothing is an absolute pain in the arse though. There’s nothing much on the internet, Facebook is blocked, and we have to stick around just in case we’re needed to do something. I don’t want to complain though, because the money is great, and I also know that as of Thursday/Friday things are going to get very much busier, and I’ll probably be wishing for a day like today.

I’ve been working with Siemens for 3 days so far with the National Assembly for Wales on a rollout of Citrix-based clients machines, running on a mixture of thin- and rich-clients and laptops.

So far we’ve just been floorwalking, which is basically walking around and helping people if they have problems. Not many people had problems. It has been very boring.

Today we had a meeting to find out the schedule for the next three weeks (I have another 4 to run on the contract after this week) and let’s just say ‘It’s gonna be busy’.

From next week I believe, we’ll all be meeting in Cardiff at 07.30 in order to do what we all need to do. I already get up at 06.30 to be in just before 08.00 so that one’s gonna require an earlier start. Next week is deliveries of kit around Wales, but I’ll be remaining fairly local.

The next two weeks (starting Sunday April 13th and working non-stop through until the following Friday (25th)) I’ll be going from Cardiff to Llandridod Wells, via such wonderful places as Tremorfa, Nantgarw and Pontypool, and ending up back at Cardiff.

It’s gonna be busy, but it’s a great way to really earn the money, so I’m looking forward to it. I just wish the starts weren’t quite so early … anybody know of a decent place to get breakfast in Cardiff near Cathays?

On another note, I connected the RSS Feed of this blog up to Facebook yesterday, and got a bunch of responses to the ‘Reading’ entry. Of course, the idea of these things is to occasionally promote discussion, it was just a bit annoying that it was all through another site

So I removed the RSS link, and we’ll see where that goes.

Talking of Facebook, it seems to be terminally broken at the moment, I can’t get it to load at all. I’m wondering if somebody’s just launched a massive Denial of Service attack against them …