Payday

Today is the glorious 27th. Glorious because it is payday. Every month, the 27th is the day when I get paid. Unless the 27th is a Saturday, Sunday, or Bank Holiday, when I get paid on the last Thursday. Or something like that. There's some method to it but I try not to pay too much attention to it.

And it seems that it has been a productive day. When a young boy's thoughts turn to money matters, the frugal impulse kicks in, and I find new ways to ensure that my pennies are properly conserved and stored for the future. So this evening I have been making phone calls a-plenty.

First off, a call to the nice people at the cable company. Long-term readers will know that for some baffling reason I continue to pay them for their lousy service. I made a phone call today to bring that amount down to something slightly less. Not much, it only saves £4.50 a month, but for something I never EVER use, and only seem to hang on to for no good reason at all, it seems like a reasonable saving to be made. And it takes me one step closer to cancelling for good, one day.

Secondly, a phone call to the nice people at Sky. People say bad things about Sky but I got through to them quickly, got straight through to the right department, and told them where they could shove their movie channels. (Which, rather ungraciously, I had been getting cheap for the last three months, although that offer has now expired.) And while disposing of the movie channels, I also got rid of the "News & Events Mix", because there's nothing in it I need, and the only two news channels which matter (Sky News and the other one) are free anyway. No point in paying £21 a month when you can just as easily pay £20 a month. (That's "5 mix" for those playing along at home.)

Earlier in the day, a phone call to BT, from whom I had ordered their whizz-bang "BT Vision" television broadband thingummy. Boxes and stuff were supposed to arrive yesterday, but they did not. A call to BT today reveals that there is "some kind of problem" with my order, which they cannot track down or fix, leaving them with no option but to cancel my order completely. And cancelling this order will take 48 hours. So could I please call back and order again next week?

Sure. Or I could just not bother. Another £14.99 a month saved! Perhaps I'd rather have the money.

Had a quick look around my various online banking accounts and was delighted to discover that the missing £3 (which had gone missing in a previous "lost cheque" shenanigan) was now once again found. Which was nice. This may be the electronic equivalent of finding coins down the back of the sofa.

Registered an internet domain name (a www.something) for possible use in future artistic endeavours.

Bought £100 of premium bonds, in the hope that my number might come up and the resulting millions will pay for those future artistic endeavours.

Looking over my other monthly outgoings, I can't see anything too obvious to get rid of. So that'll do for now. And so it is that, as with every payday, I am briefly a man of means. Hooray! Of course there's a whole month's worth of bills to come yet. :-)