Day 27

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Money, money, money, why does it always cause so much stress. Here’s the thing, during my last contract in London, there were issues with payment, one simple issue really, they weren’t paying me on time. By ‘on time’ I mean they still haven’t paid me and it’s now the 22nd of Feb, so some of the late payments are going on four months now.

This has been a huge inconvenience, to say the least. I have lost money in interest charges. I’ve had to juggle money around, I’ve had to constantly worry about what money was where and when. If I had been paid on time, none of this would have been necessary.

Worse still is the need to constantly chase the money, I‘m on holiday, I want to forget about work. And for every e-mail I send I get the same old BS, “Oh we’re planning on making a payment next week.” However next week never bloody comes does it!

So I did ‘The nice guy‘. I waited, they said they pay me before Christmas. They didn’t. But Christmas is a busy time, or so I told myself, so I didn’t worry. Then it was New Years and I figured everyone was on holiday so I was patient and I waited, still no payment. So at the beginning of January I sent another e-mail, and guess what, there appears to be only one person in this company who can make payments, and he was on holiday, so I’d have to wait some more. So I waited, and eventually he came back from holiday and then I was told they’d try and pay me next week. And that’s right, you guessed it, next week never came and so I e-mailed and e-mailed and e-mailed, and I got the same response each time. And then I needed the money because I had to pay various taxes. So I asked, and I was told that, get this, this will make you laugh, they told me that things like this happen, and in fact they hadn’t received a payment that they were told they were going to receive last week. Yeap, you’ve got it, they considered that since they hadn’t receive a payment after 1 week it was equivalent to me not being paid for months and months and months. Therefore I should really just shut up and deal with it. So I had taxes to pay, and I needed the money, so after more nice, pleading e-mails I received a partial payment. Not enough so I ended up transferring my own personal money to pay the taxes. But that was basically the last straw, I had been the ‘nice guy’ that got me nowhere, I had played the ‘squeaky wheel’ and that had got me some money. So I decided to play the arsehole.

You see I wasn’t complete stupid when I agreed to continue working with this company. I had had the foresight to get it written into my new contract that if they didn’t pay me within 21 days I could charge them a penalty, a large one. And so I prepared the penalty charges invoice and sent it off. Why did I wait so long? Well I guess because I had faith that they would do the right thing and pay me without the need for me to revert to sending them this invoice.

Well I got a response. Basically they denied receiving one of the invoices that I was claiming. So I said it would take me a week to create a new invoice. A bit of an exaggeration, but not much. But before I’d send it I’d check my bank account. Well guess what, that week I received a payment. So that leaves a total of three outstanding.

So I sent the new invoice, but now they aren’t saying anything to me. Watch this space.

Well anyway, it was a tiring day the day before so we decided to have a relaxing day. Anna wanted to try out the chocolates and I was happy to have a quiet walk around the town.

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