The "I just need a place to vent" thread

[ckn]

I couldn't find a good place to put this as it's not a rant, it's too serious for Uninteresting Trivial Facts and doesn't fit elsewhere, so I though a thread where people could just let off steam where perhaps they can't in the real world..

So, my one to start.

Today, I had to pay my monthly bills.  Reconciling my bank accounts took too long with me doubting myself over some spending choices.  "Should I really have just paid the year's car insurance and tax outright, why didn't I just do the monthly payments?"  I know the pay outright option is better when you have a bit of money and an uncertain future but it still took my balance down.  Seeing no income to my bank account in a month except for two days of consultancy work and my army pension is just depressing.

I then have had to look for jobs.  It's not only the worst month in a year for job hunting, it's also a bank-holiday week.  Objectively, I know that it's a tough ask finding a job before the middle of September when the kids are back at school and people have had a chance to get new recruitments authorised.  Subjectively, it's bloody anxious going seeing no new job for the second month now.  I've been out of my old hunting grounds for too long meaning it's far harder for me to go back to the self-employment route as well.

I need a holiday but I can't justify the expense given I don't know when I'll be getting money in.

And then there's my wife.  She's getting better slowly but I can't lay these problems on her as it will undoubtedly set her back.  At least we're down to around £500-£600 per month in healthcare costs rather than the £1000+ we've had for the last seven years.

On the good side, my blood test results came back that the GP wanted over my general health and as a check-up over my high blood pressure, my cholesterol came back as a warning low yet again, below the reference lines on both good and bad cholesterol readings.  My GP said: "you're overweight by a good two stones, you don't exercise much and have stress through the roof, making your blood pressure unacceptably high but you need to go eat a greasy burger or two"

Thank $deity for good mates otherwise I'd be a right bloody mess...

[ColT]

I got banned from the CC forum for engaging very civilly about CC stuff. 

[ckn]

2 minutes ago, ColT said:

I got banned from the CC forum for engaging very civilly about CC stuff. 

That's because you're a returned banned poster who didn't learn to keep his head down. You were identified almost immediately but went straight back to the content and format that eventually got you banned last time.

CC is not an open forum.

[Farmduck]

Mmmmm. Isn't venting just ranting, though?

[ckn]

10 minutes ago, Farmduck said:

Mmmmm. Isn't venting just ranting, though?

Nah, a rant insinuates fault.  A vent could just be "I have a problem and need a good whine."!

[ColT]

53 minutes ago, ckn said:

That's because you're a returned banned poster who didn't learn to keep his head down. You were identified almost immediately but went straight back to the content and format that eventually got you banned last time.

CC is not an open forum.

Identified implies I tried to hide my IP or personality which I didn't. If you can point out what post in the CC forum contravened your rather capricious T&Cs then I will adjust accordingly. If having a tattoo on my arm saying "I hate Yawnion" is a pre-cursor then guilty as charged, no tattoos. If I liking both codes, played both codes and even been involved in the hosting of a former RL club outside of the heartlands counts then I qualify. 

[ckn]

18 minutes ago, ColT said:

Identified implies I tried to hide my IP or personality which I didn't. If you can point out what post in the CC forum contravened your rather capricious T&Cs then I will adjust accordingly. If having a tattoo on my arm saying "I hate Yawnion" is a pre-cursor then guilty as charged, no tattoos. If I liking both codes, played both codes and even been involved in the hosting of a former RL club outside of the heartlands counts then I qualify. 

Seriously, can you just not accept you went way above and beyond the level required to get banned and we then turned a blind eye to you coming back on to see if you could change your spots.  You didn't.  You got your CC rights removed.

[Dave T]

1 hour ago, ckn said:

Nah, a rant insinuates fault.  A vent could just be "I have a problem and need a good wine."!

Sorted your typo for you.

[ColT]

23 minutes ago, ckn said:

Seriously, can you just not accept you went way above and beyond the level required to get banned and we then turned a blind eye to you coming back on to see if you could change your spots.  You didn't.  You got your CC rights removed.

If I was flat outright trolling then fair cop, but the fact is I'm not and I have a genuine interest in RL. You can't even point out a post that goes 'way above and beyond'. If the CC forum isn't where some contrary views can be exchanged then what's the point of having it segregated? 

[Bearman]

8 hours ago, ckn said:

I couldn't find a good place to put this as it's not a rant, it's too serious for Uninteresting Trivial Facts and doesn't fit elsewhere, so I though a thread where people could just let off steam where perhaps they can't in the real world..

So, my one to start.

Today, I had to pay my monthly bills.  Reconciling my bank accounts took too long with me doubting myself over some spending choices.  "Should I really have just paid the year's car insurance and tax outright, why didn't I just do the monthly payments?"  I know the pay outright option is better when you have a bit of money and an uncertain future but it still took my balance down.  Seeing no income to my bank account in a month except for two days of consultancy work and my army pension is just depressing.

I then have had to look for jobs.  It's not only the worst month in a year for job hunting, it's also a bank-holiday week.  Objectively, I know that it's a tough ask finding a job before the middle of September when the kids are back at school and people have had a chance to get new recruitments authorised.  Subjectively, it's bloody anxious going seeing no new job for the second month now.  I've been out of my old hunting grounds for too long meaning it's far harder for me to go back to the self-employment route as well.

I need a holiday but I can't justify the expense given I don't know when I'll be getting money in.

And then there's my wife.  She's getting better slowly but I can't lay these problems on her as it will undoubtedly set her back.  At least we're down to around £500-£600 per month in healthcare costs rather than the £1000+ we've had for the last seven years.

On the good side, my blood test results came back that the GP wanted over my general health and as a check-up over my high blood pressure, my cholesterol came back as a warning low yet again, below the reference lines on both good and bad cholesterol readings.  My GP said: "you're overweight by a good two stones, you don't exercise much and have stress through the roof, making your blood pressure unacceptably high but you need to go eat a greasy burger or two"

Thank $deity for good mates otherwise I'd be a right bloody mess...

Mate, why on earth do you put yourself through the stress of moderating this forum?

But, can I for one thank you for all you do do. You would certainly be missed.

[ckn]

55 minutes ago, Bearman said:

Mate, why on earth do you put yourself through the stress of moderating this forum?

But, can I for one thank you for all you do do. You would certainly be missed.

Thanks for that. This forum is a bunch of nice folk, even those I strongly disagree with and Wigan folk, and really doesn't need much moderation at all. At most I have to make a hard choice about once every month or so, the rest are easy things such as binning spammers and giving advice. 

Plus, everyone needs somewhere else to go as a distraction from life and this forum is one of mine.  A lot of that is why I get annoyed at those who just should know better and try to spoil it for others.

[Wiltshire Rhino]

9 hours ago, ColT said:

 I have a genuine interest in RL. 

Well in that case you'll enjoy writing and reading about RL on the General RL Forum. 

 

Here's a link so you won't get lost - http://www.totalrl.com/forums/index.php?/forum/341-the-general-rugby-league-forum/

[gingerjon]

18 hours ago, ckn said:

Then there's my wife.  She's getting better slowly but I can't lay these problems on her as it will undoubtedly set her back.  At least we're down to around £500-£600 per month in healthcare costs rather than the £1000+ we've had for the last seven years.

Really pleased to hear she's getting better albeit expensively and not quickly.  At least the direction of travel is the right one.

EDIT

As for jobs, I'm in an 'interim' post at the minute and really need to locate a more useful permanent one. I checked a week ago and there was 1 thing I could apply for, I checked again this week and there were 11, all with mid September deadlines.  I assume that's the case for most sectors.

[ckn]

3 hours ago, gingerjon said:

Really pleased to hear she's getting better albeit expensively and not quickly.  At least the direction of travel is the right one.

EDIT

As for jobs, I'm in an 'interim' post at the minute and really need to locate a more useful permanent one. I checked a week ago and there was 1 thing I could apply for, I checked again this week and there were 11, all with mid September deadlines.  I assume that's the case for most sectors.

Thanks for that.  I still hold a massive grudge against the state that my wife was lucky we could afford this, how many others are in the same circumstance but have to just suck it up because there's nothing there for them.  There but for the grace of $deity go I.

On the jobs side, I got a call at 9 this morning trying to get me to apply for a job.  Sounded great, perfect type of job for me managing a region of a large organisation which deals with disabled people.  Then they sent me the spec, it's one of the outsourced companies dealing with disability inspections for benefits and the job is all around ensuring maximum revenue and profitability for the region from those inspections, not a single mention about the people beyond them as a revenue generator.  I'm not sure there would be many jobs more soul destroying out there for me.  Struggling to have the will to keep job hunting today!

[gingerjon]

5 minutes ago, ckn said:

Thanks for that.  I still hold a massive grudge against the state that my wife was lucky we could afford this, how many others are in the same circumstance but have to just suck it up because there's nothing there for them.  There but for the grace of $deity go I.

As you know, it cost us *actually I can't write it but it's so much money* to go through the supposedly free tribunal service to get Little Ginger (not so little now) into the autism-friendly special school he obviously needs to go to.  This is after selling the house we owned in leafy Bucks and moving to less-leafy Hastings with the difference paying his school fees and other legal/medical bills for a few years.  We have nothing left now.  But we are genuinely in a better position than families who don't have the money, or the time, or the connections (we got a lot of pro bono help via friends) to get things done.

[ckn]

14 minutes ago, gingerjon said:

As you know, it cost us *actually I can't write it but it's so much money* to go through the supposedly free tribunal service to get Little Ginger (not so little now) into the autism-friendly special school he obviously needs to go to.  This is after selling the house we owned in leafy Bucks and moving to less-leafy Hastings with the difference paying his school fees and other legal/medical bills for a few years.  We have nothing left now.  But we are genuinely in a better position than families who don't have the money, or the time, or the connections (we got a lot of pro bono help via friends) to get things done.

I'm happy to accept how lucky we were that I'd been working successfully self-employed for a few years before she got really ill, we'd put aside quite a bit of money, were quite well ahead in our mortgage and has no debts at all beyond that.  We're in the same situation as you, we've nothing left if there's another major expense.

We've been OK in that my wife has had half-salary since 2011, it's not a huge amount but it's kept us afloat.  Again, we only got that because I have legal industry friends who wrote a particularly blunt "before action" letter to her employer when they were trying to manager her out on capacity grounds and her manager said "we haven't a clue what to do if we came in and found you hanging from the light fittings" as one of the more pleasant things in that process.  We've got a nice apology letter from the global CEO promising that that half-pay will stay until she retires if she doesn't get better.

It really is shocking that it takes connected friends and money to do something as basic as getting a child to the right school or life-saving treatment for someone desperately ill.

Again, that's beyond a rant now.  That's just life and disappointment that people accept it and keep voting for it.

[ckn]

On 01/09/2017 at 11:30 AM, gingerjon said:

As you know, it cost us *actually I can't write it but it's so much money* to go through the supposedly free tribunal service to get Little Ginger (not so little now) into the autism-friendly special school he obviously needs to go to.  This is after selling the house we owned in leafy Bucks and moving to less-leafy Hastings with the difference paying his school fees and other legal/medical bills for a few years.  We have nothing left now.  But we are genuinely in a better position than families who don't have the money, or the time, or the connections (we got a lot of pro bono help via friends) to get things done.

Is this commentary on special education needs anything like your scenario?

[gingerjon]

9 minutes ago, ckn said:

Is this commentary on special education needs anything like your scenario?

There's a lot that's familiar.  We were very lucky on two fronts: Little Ginger was in the system because of his extreme birth, and, with support from his school, we got him a statement approved before he even started Reception year which was pretty rare.

I know from one insider that *redacted* council has a soft target to cut its SEN provision by declining EHCPs for *redacted* per cent of children who had formal statements.

[ckn]

19 minutes ago, gingerjon said:

There's a lot that's familiar.  We were very lucky on two fronts: Little Ginger was in the system because of his extreme birth, and, with support from his school, we got him a statement approved before he even started Reception year which was pretty rare.

I know from one insider that *redacted* council has a soft target to cut its SEN provision by declining EHCPs for *redacted* per cent of children who had formal statements.

I'm friends with a couple of county councillors and they're both quitting at the next election, they're sick and fed up of being criticised for the government's cuts and them having to decide which bit of essential "muscle" they have to cut away next.  It does come down to either cutting one essential thing or another and many councils are taking the easy way out of cutting things with slow-burn effects rather than dramatic acute issues such as social work; a kid not getting essential education is rarely going to make any of the news pages while a kid being let down terribly by social work often does.

[gingerjon]

4 hours ago, ckn said:

I'm friends with a couple of county councillors and they're both quitting at the next election, they're sick and fed up of being criticised for the government's cuts and them having to decide which bit of essential "muscle" they have to cut away next.  It does come down to either cutting one essential thing or another and many councils are taking the easy way out of cutting things with slow-burn effects rather than dramatic acute issues such as social work; a kid not getting essential education is rarely going to make any of the news pages while a kid being let down terribly by social work often does.

Must be hard for them.  The issue a lot of SEN parents face though is the bureaucracy side where counties are spending more money (sometimes by eye-watering factors) to prevent children getting what they need than meeting that need would cost. I know of a case in Buckinghamshire where county spent £8,000 on legal fees fighting a one-off therapy programme of £4,000 required by a child with a degenerative condition.  The case in court lasted the length of time it took for the judge to dismiss and beg them not to waste his time in such a way again.

[ckn]

9 minutes ago, gingerjon said:

Must be hard for them.  The issue a lot of SEN parents face though is the bureaucracy side where counties are spending more money (sometimes by eye-watering factors) to prevent children getting what they need than meeting that need would cost. I know of a case in Buckinghamshire where county spent £8,000 on legal fees fighting a one-off therapy programme of £4,000 required by a child with a degenerative condition.  The case in court lasted the length of time it took for the judge to dismiss and beg them not to waste his time in such a way again.

Unfortunately this is common everywhere.  If they gave that £4000 then that sets a precedent as a minimum standard that they have to give to everyone, the loss in the court is specific to that child and won't be considered a precedent.  They then hope that other parents haven't the means to challenge their own specific cases in court, plus they know that the parents would be laughed at for thinking about legal aid or professional help out of anything but an overstretched charity.  For every £8000 case they lose they probably out-bankroll 5-10 other families into not forcing it through court meaning the net overall cost is lower.

Yet people will still say that "austerity" is necessary.

[gingerjon]

11 minutes ago, ckn said:

Unfortunately this is common everywhere.  If they gave that £4000 then that sets a precedent as a minimum standard that they have to give to everyone, the loss in the court is specific to that child and won't be considered a precedent.  They then hope that other parents haven't the means to challenge their own specific cases in court, plus they know that the parents would be laughed at for thinking about legal aid or professional help out of anything but an overstretched charity.  For every £8000 case they lose they probably out-bankroll 5-10 other families into not forcing it through court meaning the net overall cost is lower.

Yet people will still say that "austerity" is necessary.

Don't.

East Sussex were quite prepared to spend nearly £20,000 per year on taxi charges for Little Ginger so he could go to a mainstream school with inappropriate provision.