The Waiting Man

Because I don't have the template for the forward/backward penguin meme & I don't have the time to go looking for it...

Had a meeting with my main client about my measuring contract, looking to raise my rate so I can actually make some kind of profit in the next financial year... Got turned down & told to wait, as there will be some form of compensation proposal next week

Actually, maybe I need the depressed bear meme for this one...

Flickr have sent me a message that they will delete over 2000 of my photos hosted on their site, because I no longer have a 'Pro' account & therefore can only have 1000 photos there. Part of me is, of course, outraged by this - having been a 'Pro' member for about 10 years before they put the price up to over AUD$60 per year - part of me is kind of okay with it, as long as they start the removal from the oldest → newest & not the other way around. While it may be of some use to me, to see how I progressed as a photographer over a decade of hits'n'misses, it's not necessarily something that anyone else is interested in trawling through & I'd probably prefer it if people saw the newest 1000 which are a world away in quality from the place where I started

It is annoying, as Flickr is easily the best photo-hosting site I've found. I've been using a free account with 500px for the last year since the price rise & it's not as easy to use, limits the number of photos you can post at a time & just doesn't have the same sense of community that I found on Flickr. Despite all this, I still find it hard to assign a value of AUD$60+ to it...

In other news, after a week of humidity, Winter is coming... outside right now it's quite windy & the temperature has definitely dropped a few degrees since Friday's ridiculous-for-mid-Autumn 27○. To celebrate the change to the cooler seasons, L-SP has caught a cold from somewhere & I'm doing my best to keep it away from me. That she's been on night-shift most of the last week, has made that a little easier, but the next few days on a common circadian rhythm will be the real test

So... Six weeks on from my release for bad behaviour from DP2 & two things have not yet happened. The first is, obviously, no suitable employment has been wrestled to the ground. The second is that DSODD have not come to my bank balance's aid yet. A phone call to them this morning turned into a bit of a cross-country marathon, ending with a man in Perth who decided to start the whole process over from scratch ~ meaning another half-hour phone interview, then another personal interview on Tuesday next week before anything even begins to get processed & happening. I also had a call from another DSODD operative today, wanting to interview me about the circumstances of my departure from Debtor's Prison, with a view to establishing whether I get back-paid to the beginning of April (when I initially contacted them), or if I'll have to wait another two weeks for payment because I resigned (kinda-sorta) & didn't have the good fortune to be fired instead.

I knew I should have hit that store manager when I had the chance...

Meanwhile the automated e-mail responses to my myriad job applications keep rolling in.

A day of abounding stuff...

The Department of Subsidising the Old, Disabled or just plain Dumb (DSODD), or Centrelink as it's more commonly known are a strange lot. They want me to provide an earnings statement for some bank shares I have because an old superannuation fund I have was converted to shares a few years ago & I receive an annual cheque for about $100. Given that I never even bother to declare it in my tax return ~ just like I don't claim for a lot of random charity donations, so it evens out ~ I have no idea how they found out about it, but they have decided to withhold my unemployment allowance 'til I convince them this yearly pittance is not a major source of income for me.

Having already visited DSODD a couple of times in my quest to remain vaguely solvent & been given, variously, the cold shoulder, the paperwork shuffle & the old-fashioned run-around, I'm beginning to think it will be simpler to find a new job than trudge the exponential paper trail DSODD lay out before me. Only time will tell.

May tonight be fruitful.