Malbridge House

I think today qualifies as being one of the most stressful days I’ve had in about 6 months, it involved a bank, a company taking money out that’s not due out for another two weeks and charges. Apparently it takes seconds for somebody to take money out of your account, but 48 hours for them to get it back, we’ve incurred charges because it caused us to go overdrawn, the bank have offered us an overdraft to pay those charges with, otherwise we would have an unauthorised overdraft and have to pay more charges.

Malc was on the phone for OVER AN HOUR on hold, he’s far more patient than me, although I think they kept putting me to the back of the queue every time I shouted an obscenity down to the phone to their awful music!

It’s taken all day and it’s still not sorted, we’ve got to get letters and send complaints off, it makes me wonder if the money in my account is actually mine. The bank tells you where you can get it from, how much you can get out a day,oohh where have the days gone when you recieved a brown envelope at the end of the week, with proper money in it, with a proper payslip. You couldn’t spend more than you had in your hand, you had to give it over, it definitely made you more aware of how much you were spending, it dwindled in front of your eyes. Instead, now we sign a piece of paper, we don’t realise how much we’re signing away, if we had it in our hands I think we would be more careful with it.

We were in control of it, not a computer, last night Malc went to get petrol, gave them his card and it was refused, luckily we’ve been going to the same garage for over 10 years, he had to sign a piece of paper with his name, address and car reg. and go back and pay within 24 hours. He rang the bank when he got back, oh yes there was money in the account, but the card dept had problems this morning and couldn’t update all the cards, it will be updated within 24 hours.

So we’ve had two mistakes with 24 hours. Should I change my bank? Not really, I think they’re all the same, what really annoys me is that employers don’t pay cash anymore, you have to have your money paid into a bank, if you want to spread the cost of things over a year, you have to have a direct debit, you can’t go and pay it to them once a month, unless you want to pay an admin charge!

I’d written half this post out and one of the children pulled the plug out of the socket, so I’ve had to do it again! I’ll be glad when this day’s over.

Saying that today we all had our hair cut and it was Cody’s first haircut, he was such a good boy sitting still on my lap, I’ve saved some of his hair to go in his baby book.

You know, no matter how many children you have , all those firsts, bath, steps, haircut, they’re still really special.

Lord, this is how stressed I am, for the first time tonight Clark has gone to stay the night at Grandmas, I said I would ring at 9pm, I’ve just rung about three times, the line’s engaged, then I realised I’m ringing my own number, not hers!!

Roll on tomorrow, thankfully these days don’t happen too often.

We joined flat_travelers_homeschool@yahoogroups.com so I’m going to have a look at their site this evening and see what we actually have to do to get started. I’m quite looking forward to it, I didn’t do a lot of Geography at school, it certainly wasn’t one of my best subjects, so I should probably learn something alongside the children.