Dire Straits*

April is here, and with it the bleating of lambs, the slow warming of the soil, dirt under fingernails and the first flush of weeds to be winkled out of the ground with a hoe.

It also brings the end of the financial year, and the start of a new one. Quite why the revenue decided that April 5th was a good date to kick one set of accounts into the long grass, pull out a fresh sheet of graph paper, dip the quill pen in the India ink and begin the next page of double-entry,** I'll never know. But it has ramifications beyond the day to day running of the third largest economy in the world.***

You see the company which occasionally deigns to employ me does a lot of work for government. And most of this work takes the form of fixed term contracts. And those terms, however so they may be fixed, always end with the death of a financial year.

Last week I was working on three different projects. This week I have none.

Now you might think this was bad planning on my part. And you'd be right for thinking that. I completely failed to see the juggernaut of impecuniosity rushing towards me, so wrapped up was I in the joys of sql, data entry and webmastership. Idiot that I am, I completely failed to tout my unique assets around the company like the cheap ho' that I should strive to be. More fool me.

I do still have a little work to do. I have to produce a final report for the project which was fool enough to have me as webmaster, and that couldn't be done until the March statistics were in. Due to the unique logic of accountants, this work had to be paid for last month - and I was quite happy to bill the company for my promised time. But it won't take long - a day at most, and then I've really got nothing to do.

Well, nothing that pays. There's always the writing. Who knows, I might even get some done now.

* all together now - 'We are the sultans! We are the sultans! Of Swing!'
** book-keeping, you smutty people!

** or so I'm told - probably shrinking rapidly and soon to be somewhere behind Sweden or Vanuatu in the GDP stakes.

Comments

I love Dire Straits Romeo and Juliet, the one on Alchemy Live. Gets me every time, even after 21 years.
Sandra Ruttan said…
Poor planning.

And you were complaining about getting nothing done at my blog this morning? You don't have anything important to do!

Well, you do. But according to you, you aren't working on it anyway!
JamesO said…
Exactly. Every time I get started on Benfro or Inspector McLean, I find myself drawn back to the myriad distractions out there.

But at least paying work isn't one of them anymore.

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