Given a length talk on the phone to someone in Preston who couldn’t actually help, but was near the empty office of someone who could. Ruth’s written the letter to go with the summons (as much as an exercise in releasing emotions, as satisfying the who thing). And like the good little downtrodden underlings we are, we’ve decided not to bother fighting this any more than that..

Yes we’re being fined (again) for somebody’s typing error, and the system is hell bent on penalizing people for nothing more than administrative errors (where exactly was the intent?). Don’t get me started on how the whole system in structured in a way to persecute the poorer members of society (for example if you have a Drive or park in a private car park you probably wouldn’t get the second fine), but we are rolling over on this one.

The main reason is that our time is we value our time (hence the whole stay at home mum, and public sector job thing).

As Ruth pointed out yesterday, if we say we are going to court then we spend the next two weeks worrying about it. If we write the letter, then we forget about it until someone asks for the money, at which point we sigh, spend a day annoyed about and pay (hiding it in existing debt or something). So the letter way is much more cost effective for us in terms of quality time and you can’t put a price on that (although in three weeks we should have one).

We’re a bit sad that this is the choice we’ve had to make, really it’s just another fine for something we didn’t really have much control over, but the choice is let it consume our lives for two weeks, or pay and move on.

coming soon, Jail Terms for broken tail lights. missing hub caps

No we thought we’d sorted this; you may remember in march we got fined because the DVLA entered some data wrong on there computers. This resulted in us nearly getting the car clamped and towed away.

Now as we said at the time, it’s not much of an excuse not getting the reminder letter, but that’s what happened we didn’t get a letter and we forgot. As soon as someone told us, we paid all the tax we should have paid, and the fine for being forgetful, and thought it was all sorted.

Well now we’ve got a summons! It’s a bit unclear but we appear to be getting charged ?45 pounds in legal fees so that the DVLA can recover ?0.00 in owed tax (that is what the letter says). This is also a chance the Magistrate could be in a mood and fine us upto ?1,000!

Now we don’t think that’s going to happen. Hopefully the magistrate will see our letter which will say, we forgot, we got no letter, when the police told us we paid everything right away.

It would appear that common sense doesn’t exist in the legal system, Once one person forgets to type a ‘2′ on the keyboard you’re done for, a chain of events unfolds which results in a letter demanding a court appearance for ?0.00 (the letter actually printed ?0.01 and the 1 has been obscured by a penned in 0), with ?45 pound legal costs.

I’m pinning my hopes on a human being of a magistrate (good luck) that will introduce ’some’ common sense into I, and not take ?1,000 of our money because of bad data entry in the DVLA*
*As we said last time, we have the registration documents for the car, and they have our correct address on them, it was the DVLA who mistyped our address.

[update]
I’ve just looked at the DVLA website which says…

The new rules mean that keepers who fail to re-license their vehicle (or declare SORN) will incur an automatic penalty of ?80 (reduced to ?40 if paid within 28 days). Those who ignore the penalty could receive a County Court Judgement against them, could be stopped by the police, and/or have their vehicles clamped. Determined offenders will be faced with prosecution and could be fined a minimum ?1000.

Since when is paying the fine and the tax within 24 hours either ignoring the penalty or being a determined offender! (the letter we have says up to ?1000)

It may be stupid, and the physics is flawed, but tomorrow is world jump day, a day when some people think jumping up and down will solve the worlds problems (I thought only five year olds thought that ?).

I don’t think we should all jump up and down that’s not going to help anyone, and I’m secretly scared of earthquakes. I think we need to take over this day. Just think a whole international event just for people with your name, how cool?

So if you’re a Jump, Celebrate tomorrow is our day!

My brain currently cannot except any more information. It’s not that it’s full, there’s just currently quite a backlog of stuff to be processed, and in the world of information from every angle my brain is having difficulty processing it all in time.

Over the last few days I’ve found it increasingly difficult to absorb information no matter how hard I try, my brain just goes off somewhere else and starts doing it’s own thing.

A quiet dark room sounds like the answer to me, so I’m off to see if we have any of them.

So how much Rent would you pay out for a 6 bedroom house with a swimming pool ?

?25,000 a month?

and It’s opposite a golf course.

We seem to be doing a bit of a park tour recently, today it was Woolton Woods and Camp Hill. Ruth’s been saying she doesn’t get enough woods in her life, so I’ve made it my mini mission to seek out all woodland in the area.

The Woods at Woolton are really nice, and the walled garden is extremely pleasant Daisy thought the tadpoles where particularly funny. The view from the top of the hill over to Wales is somewhat spectacular. Today isn’t crisp clear but still, I took some photos and as is my want I’ve stuck them together in an arty farty way.

One of the things I’m having to get use to in my new job, is all the acronyms, there are hundreds of them, all three letters long, and all making virtually no sense when you here them for the first time.

I’m starting to know my OSD from my ICR now, and I’ve realised just who TDAs are. It’s still a bit confusing as to who works for LCC or LDL, but most of the time that doesn’t matter as long as you get UAT done, and try to avoid going to CAB at all costs.

OSD: Outline Solution Document
ICR: Internal Change Request
TDA: Technical Desing Architect
LCC: Liverpool City Council
LDL: Liverpool Direct
UAT: User Acceptance Testing
CAB: Change Board or the meeting from hell

OK, Hopefully all those website shanangs are behind us now. Sad as I am I’ve looked at the website log files to see exactly what happened, and besides some dodgy code we spammed 283,000 people including Jeremy Paxman, Sorry Jezza.

It might be because I have a proper job, it could be because I’m still a bit traumatized by the whole moving jobs thing, it might even have been to do with the fact that there have been 64 football matches in the last month. But yes the number of posts on the blog has dropped off a bit.

So work, yes I have a ‘proper’ job. Work wise it’s loads of fun, I’m getting to do loads of new stuff, and looking at the world of development from another angle even if it is only slightly different from the last job has forced me to think more.

emotionally it’s been a bit more of a roller coaster*, the first few weeks where fish out of water not knowing anyone type scary, it all settled down a bit and then I had a bit of a relapse the other week, but I’m much better now, I’m building relationships (something which has been difficult because of the office layout more than anything), and I’m much more settled even over the last week or so than I have been.

World Cup: Well you know I’m a football junkie, so of course I’ve watched loads and loads of games, I’m at a bit of a loss at the moment, but that’s ok footie season starts in just under four weeks.

Other things that have happened: well the web site went off for a bit, this is because somebody hacked a backwater bit of the server I was using to mess about on, and started sending loads of spam emails; our service provider noticed this way before we we’re ever going to and turned it all off. A few emails later and we are all back up, and yes I’ve deleted all the other peoples bits code that I was looking at. Strictly my own code from now on.

*and how in this family do we deal with this ? We play computer games of course, loads of roller coaster tycoon as it turns out.