Arrrgh. I don’t even know what I’m writing any more.

Its been a good few weeks since my last entry to the blog and its boiled down to a number of things – mainly lack of time, effort and the fact that a few of the buttons on my laptop had to be ripped off because I got grains of dirt trapped under the keys. That meant I was left with these tiny rubber circles to press instead of a nice flat bit of plastic. When those circles happen to represent g, right shift and space bar, this becomes a particular chore, but I digress.

The lack of time and effort thing boils down to my job. Back at home I work in an inbound (that means I answer the calls, not make them) call centre handling customer support for Creation Consumer Finance. This is the company that lends you money to buy overly large televisions from Bennets and sofas from Land of Leather. I wrote an entire post on how the job is, but I’ve since discarded the old material and re-written, but I think I’ve got kind of a mixed response to it, which means I’ll have to write and re-write before I’m ready to tell the world whether or not one should get a job answering the phone all day.

I also have notes scribbled down on a dilapidated notebook on Copenhagen, coming back from it and whether or not it was a good idea to do so. In a lot of ways, I haven’t decided.

That’s the thing with going anywhere, whether you’ve never been there or that you’ve lived there all your life. Initially, the change of scenery is nice. You get a different mix of people too, which given your freshness means that you can be treated with a really warm reception. People have either missed your presence, friendship and company or they appreciate it because its new and therefore with a slight novelty towards it. Get a warm reception and you’ll get a warm feeling, you feel more confident, happy and settled in life. You treat everything with a renewed sense of wonder and you feel as if nothing could go wrong in your life. Optimism leads to more optimism, when things are going right in your life and you have this feeling of confidence things seem to go along with it.

That’s what it was. I was having a ball of a time, meeting friends, going out. Meeting new people, seeing new things. Watched the Incredible Hulk, played some card games, got drunk, got high.

The problem is, give a week or two and something to go wrong and you’re back to square one; at least in my experience.

Ever since I lost my bike key and my bike has been locked up to a bike stand, before being consequently stripped of half of its parts, things haven’t been that swell. Had the odd moment of greatness, but equally or perhaps more so there have been a number of crapifying minutes of my life I’d like to forget.

Now, there were a serious of things that f-ed with my happiness for a little while. First of all work started getting on top of me – I went through a series of days where I had to take call after call, that was fine until I lost the key to my bike lock. By the time I had even half a solution to removing the notoriously stubborn kryptonite lock (this is one of those metal U-locks where if you use it and your bike is stolen they will give you £1500, apparently). I also had a bit of trouble from a this bat-shit insane girl who I’ll talk about if you ever ask me.

You get the odd niggling problems as well. Take for instance today (this part was written last Wednesday). This girl who works in the cash office (to pass the time, e-flirting goes a long way) and I were e-mailing a little back and forth. Since she said she’d go for a drink with me I was starting to get ideas I was in there. Guess what though. I fall into the “Oh I have a boyfriend trap”. Not that I’m not used to it by now, every guy should, but it still sucks.

People always ask me what I think of Belfast/Lancaster/Copenhagen and I think I can only give one true response, something that applies to all of them.

They have their moments.

That is to say, from time to time, they can be truly amazing. Maybe you just have one of those days that are great, that makes you glad to be alive. Then you have a string of days that are kind of.. meaningless.

Those days when you’re in a call centre doing nothing. Its not that you would be doing anything with a day off, the weather might be bad wherever you are, so you watch your landlord’s DVD collection or Battlestar Galactica season one which your friend (thanks Matt) has lent you. That’s if your friends aren’t around. Otherwise you meet up and do a variety of activities that may or may not include the following:

Alcohol/substance abuse, watching movies, playing card games, doing sweet f.a. in a park.

It’s not so bad, but I’ve started to notice how many days just seem to blend into one another. I’d quite like to say I’m doing something useful with my time, but would I necessarily enjoy doing them? I don’t know. It’s one of those things that I need to do to find out. But to do them , I need to arrange them around my work schedule, which seems to be endless. This week, I will have worked around sixty-one hours.

Sixty-one hours.

There are one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week.

If I sleep roughly a third of that time, its fifty six hours.

That means I’ve got fifty one hours a week to do whatever I like with it. Should be enough really, to fit in some guitar lessons, muay thai classes or more card games, but somehow I haven’t found away to do it.

Seriously though, what should I be doing with my life?

From what I gather, most of my pals also seem to be working their proverbials off, just like myself, though perhaps not to the exact same degree. Often they’re skint because instead of answering bollocks phone calls during the day, they’re actually nursing their hangovers rather than riding them out in their places of employment. That’s the method of yours truly. If I’m half drunk from the night before in work, the whole day will pass a lot quicker. I’ll sober up quickly anyway. Being that my alcoholic consumption is almost entirely based on beer consumption rather than anything else, the worst I seem to get these days is just a groggy feeling, the odd sleepiness from lack of sleep or occasionally the feeling that I’m still drunk from the night before.

Sometimes that actually makes what might be a boring day a little bit more interesting.

Its not that I hate my job, its just that I really can’t be arsed with it half the time. I’m stuck with the Homer Simpson tendency:

“If you don’t like your job, you don’t quit. You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the way, that’s the American way!”

Seems I’m living my life just like the overweight balding beer-guzzling, doughnut-digesting American cartoon character. Whenever possible, I’ll even try and catch some sleep at my computer controls. Though this never lasts that long, obviously I have to keep a look out for the discerning eye of the team leaders. Who whilst generally patient, easy-going and not thinking they’re better than the little people, still have a job to do. In turn I have to respect that. I don’t shirk on the work, its just I only do it because I have to.

Half the time, I can’t really dislike it. The further you drag me down to earth with the mundane, the more my head will go off into the sky with the arcane. Sometimes, I’m doing the obvious planning of what I’m doing later, sometimes its planning my destiny. On some level, they are one and the same.

Sometimes I question the morality of the job at hand. Like I said before, we’re acting as the middle between the finance company and either customers or retailers (depending on who’s making the call and the purpose of the call), often to give them information on their account, take payments or set up new agreements. However, there is another side to it.

As one friend put it, we’re basically selling money. As part of a company that handles credit and makes its money by applying very steep interest rates, we’re on a day to day putting people in hot water. If you fail to pay off your £1200 for your sofas, you can end up being as much as £3000 in debt to us. Now I can imagine, with the chunky thirty six instalments, that can be a bigger bite out of one’s pay-cheque than the repayments for the almost twenty grand of student loans many of us might have borrowed, people can have a lot of problem with their debts.

So, on the “no-its-not-morally-wrong” side of the argument, providing credit is the corner stone of the free market economy system. To improve one’s situation, anyone within the liberal system we live in can borrow money for the purpose of sorting out their cash flow. 95% of the time if you pay everything off in good time, it will work out well for you, but then there is that other five percent of the time.

It used to be a case that if someone rang in having failed to pay their debt by so much as a day and having incurred so much interest, I used to feel sorry for them, speak empathetically. Now, its not the case. I don’t so much as rub it in, but behave like an automaton. My answers become robotic and if you put them down on paper they would read like bullet points. Like I thought the other week, I’m getting gradually more evil working the job. Whenever someone rolls over the Special Offer Date and incurs this interest, I almost take a guilty pleasure in knowing that they have. Maybe I’m thinking in terms of the company that my job is more secure by the added money coming into the company’s account from the suffering customer. Maybe its knowing somebody else has made a mistake, one that I am believe I wouldn’t ever do in real life (three of my flat mates from second year will recall an epic drunken conversation on my birthday about buying things on credit, if you want a sofa, just save up and buy it was my bottom line). Maybe I’m just that sadistic that I’m taking pleasure in somebody else’s anguish. At the same time though, I do feel for the person that has had the bad thing happen to them. A lot can add up on a person, I don’t even know the circumstances of how they live (though if they tell me their sob stories, I’m actually more annoyed that they’ve tried to place all this guilt on me, as if I am personally responsible for their hardships and that I should bend over backwards to fix the situation).

Don’t you people understand your suffering pleases my cold dead heart?

There’s also the point that I wasn’t the one who actually sold the agreement. I didn’t advertise it, I didn’t mis-sell the agreement to the customer by telling them there would be no admin charge, no interest charge, no 3% surcharge for using a credit card to pay the bill off. In fact, it all boils down to the principle of free will. Who forced the customer to sign themselves into a contract? No-one, but their own drive for a better, more expensive and shinier sofa. It really annoys me whenever they rant and rave down the phone because they took credit out on a 48” LCD television as well and failed to pay it off within the year.

I’m the type of guy who takes pleasure in finding a bargain, takes pleasure in finding a freebee. Maybe its because I like the idea of saving for my future, or generally just so I can save my money for other things i.e. drinking and smoking. Those of you that know me may remember about half a year ago I purchased this 24” CFT television for a grand total of £16 off ebay. Not only was the screen grossly oversized in comparison to the one bed en-suite rooms of Lancaster university’s campus, but the picture quality was pretty good as well. It just looked amazing in comparison to the otherwise bare room. In fact, I think if you said to me

“Here’s seven hundred pounds, go and buy a big television,”

I would look the gift horse in the mouth. I’d question why not buy a half decent one for under £100 and save the rest for other things.

I think half of Lancaster will remember Mr. Loverstreet’s discovery of a giant television that was being thrown out that the Carpenter and I carted round to the ground floor of Block 28 and installed in Sean-joe’s room, in place of a scrawny (but serviceable) 14” television. Oh the FIFA we played..!

Now my point about this is not that I have an eye for bargains or that I think more ascetically than a bunch of idiots who ring up to give me abuse down the phone about excessive interest rates, but that the simple things in life need to be appreciated more. Try not to get sucked up into consumerism and the keeping-up-with-the-jones’ lifestyle that has people buy stupid shit. Or if you really need to, save up and buy it. The company doesn’t send out reminders that people need to pay off their bill because it shouldn’t need to. If you sign an agreement (and are handed not only a that says pay off this large amount of money we’re lending you by January, its your prerogative to make the payment.

Someone else said this about another call centre:

“I’m not a nazi, I’m just working in the gas chamber.”

In some respects, this one is no different.

But then, on the other hand you have four fingers and a thumb.

What I do like about this place, there is a bit of a cool mix of people down at the oul (this is a Norn Irish term meaning old, but really a term of endearment) office. From a bunch of slightly chunky but generally friendly and likable lesbians in their mid-twenties, to an ex-priest in training to uni students, middle aged housewives and eighteen year olds with limited life experience and limited education.

I got off to a good start with most people here. Many of them are as geeky as I am. I’ve played about half of the customer services department at chess and won, only to have a challenger coming from the underwriting department (this is where they credit score you to decide if we can trust you to make payments back on your hundreds of pounds). I’ve also shared and discussed comics, music, science, religion, films with a lot of people, finding out I share a lot of tastes with people.

You get the odd brainless person, who knows little more than the musical stylings of Cascada, hair extensions, shoes and Baracardi breezers, but they’re sometimes fun for even a giggle. I’m not going to act up like an emo child and say that they are so low on intellect and intelligence they are a problem with society, because that would be very short sighted and overly pedantic, judgemental and failing to enjoy the simple nuances of simple people. They are funny in a round about way.

So about Belfast then? Any good?

Its gotten a helluva lot better over the last few months.

For instance, one can actually enjoy a night out in Belfast and then with a carry out go and sit on the protective surroundings of a bandstand centred in the middle of a park at about three o’clock in the morning.

Clubs seem to be improving too, though with the credit crunch on the go, things have gotten a fair bit more expensive. £20 can still last you a night the way we play it though. Times are good. Except the green scene.

What started as a very promising few weeks in terms of what we could get our hands on smoke wise, things soon turned sour. After getting a hydroponically grown bag of awesome, there seems to be a new drought. Or a turn to five score bags (£25 for about 2 grams of sand blasted bud, simply marvellous. Sorry did I just blow up a sarcasm). We got an O between four of us of soap bar stuff, it did the job, but it hot rocked to be-Jesus and it just isn’t the same. Give me the pungent stuff that smells like a greenhouse full of miracle-gro and I’ll be happy.

From anyone else’s view it’s kind of clear what I need – either a girlfriend or a hobby. Even though I’ve kind of pointed out that since I’m working all day I have time constraints and need to relax, someone really needs me to take me somewhere where I take up rock climbing or martial arts or something. I should really learn to enjoy other things in life than getting stoned and playing card games. But you do whatever you enjoy. No point forcing yourself to do things you don’t want to do. Actually that doesn’t make sense, I’d probably never go to work.

Well I might.. just for my attractive female colleagues..

Life is what you make it. If I’m working too many hours, I bring it on myself. Days that seem meaningless will make the days that seem meaningful more so.

That’s about all for now. Catch you on the flipside

C-dogg (irony)