I’ve still not been paid and must now be owed the best part of £10k. The company I still nominally work for is bust but has’t been wound up yet so I can’t get a P45 and the redundancy £. Bizarrely, if I resign I will lose it and become just another creditor. I wo’t have a P45 and can’t sign on so my mortgage protection wo’t kick in because I made myself “intentionally unemployed”.
So I’m stuck until the company is wound up or I find another job and write the present nonsense off to experience. Hopefully get the redundancy dosh from the government eventually. This amounts to less than a third of what I’m actually owed if it ever arrives, in ever-decreasing proportions because it’s based on 8 weeks at a nominal amount.
The client we did the work for are willing to take us on as contractors and that means there should be something coming in, but it wo’t fix the hole, just let me start slowly paying my debts off again. The rate is much lower than the usual commercial rate too but that may change once the cashflow starts (another 8-12 weeks though). Or it might not (cynic, moi?). This is’t starting until the 1st July anyway.
The upside of this is that I have started to think like a business owner again and have started up my own company. This is why I’ve published my novel and am starting to get my other stuff together – I want lots of small-to-medium income streams rather than one reasonable-but-unreliable one.
I had a moment this morning when I got up and I was in despair. I said that I could see us losing the house and all the things we’ve worked so hard for over the last 20 years. Rosie’s response was oh no we’re not. If Rosie says it it must be true, she’s much taller than me and I have to do what I’m told! Never cross a six-foot red head.
The Buddhist in me knows that impermanence is the lot of us all and you can’t fight having to lose stuff eventually. But I’d rather hang on until I’m losing it because I die of old age or give it away because I don’t need it any more, rather than some self-deception on the part of my former (but he is’t, yet!) boss.
If you need a Ruby on Rails programmer with 2 years’ Rails experience and 20 years of systems analysis and whatnot, contact me on francis AT francisfish.com. Here is my CV francis_fish_short_cv.doc
Onward and upward.