Funny isn’t it, that when the price of petrol rockets up it’s always because of just the one reason, but yet there are thousands of reasons offered as to why it never drops in price just as quickly. Dang, that’s whack.
It’s a bit like getting money out of the IRD when it’s owed to you. They purposely try and bore you into submission by having you fill out a huge mountain of paper based bureaucracy, in triplicate, in the hope that you’ll get pissed off and forget about it. But when the role is reversed and you owe them money then shit gets real simple; pay up or we kill you. Geez even the mafia are discreet about the ramifications of not paying what is owed by the time it’s owed.
I was once overpaid by Income Support back in the day when my life revolved around reading the morning paper cover to cover just in time to do the same with the evening paper. By then it was all old news so I often wonder why I bothered but hey, what else was I going to do? I was unemployed for all of a month after I left college and in between reading the papers, masturbating my brains out and coming up with funny voices so as to ring up the talkback and pretend I was someone I wasn’t in order to pass off my extremist views on pressing social issues like the use of apostrophes in public signage, I collected the dole for a short period.
The government gave me a $110 in the hand each week, no questions asked. I had bugger all rent to pay because I was still living with the old man. Man I was living the dream. Well, not really, but I did buy a lot of comics with what I had left over after paying my rent and buying my papers. Life didn’t get any better than that.
Then I got a job and forgot to cancel my dole the first week I was working and subsequently got overpaid. Seeing as I was now a high roller, earning $12 an hour at Hallensteins I decided to play hardball when they rung me to tell me I owed them and arranged repayments of $2 a week. Fuck that told them – when you mess with bull, you get the horns.
I paid back all of it bar about $4. I couldn’t be arsed walking down the road to the grotty welfare office to pay the money so I never did. They kept ringing and I kept ignoring them because I was hardcore. Unbeknownst to me they passed the massive debt of mine onto Baycorp and that was the end of my credit rating for six long years. Four bucks for crying out loud! It probably cost more for the letter and envelope they sent me the debt collection notice on! But I blame myself. Not for the first time I had failed to heed dear old Grandma Eve’s advice when she always said ‘Smarty gave a party and no-one came’.
Maybe that’s the reason I hate game shows. I don’t know about you cats but I take no delight in watching someone win free money on TV. In fact quite the opposite, I would like to see a game show where they take money off you – IRD style - if you don’t get the question right. Now that would make for interesting viewing. Certainly better than the NZ version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire where they seem to ask extraordinary hard questions like ‘How do you spell RSVP?’.
See money management is not something they ever taught me at school. They spent an exorbitant amount of time trying to teach me how to math with letters – something that no prick ever used after they left school – but not essential life skills like how to avoid having the financial equivalent of a rubber fist shoved up your jacksee. Economics seemed like a good place to have learnt that shit but I did it for two years and I can’t remember what the hell I did there the entire time, other than take the piss out of Mr Moriaty, an intelligent yet small man who didn’t like me or my wingman, Coops.
Of course we didn’t help matters by doing things like placing the duster just out of reach – even if he jumped – atop the blackboard before the start of each lesson, or making outrageous claims that just couldn’t be left unchallenged like that it was we that had invented the question mark. He disliked Coops particularly, but that was probably because Coops countered everything he said with a very open ended, but insightful “But what’s the point?”
It was of course a rhetorical question. There is no point of learning economics because the Arabs own and run everything and Asia consumes everything. Lesson over. That’s why the price of petrol goes up like a rubber fist up the chocolate starfish, but never down.
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