Clipping the ticket

Another lovey summer day in London. Wow that means there have been three in a row. Not so for China, There is a TV in the reception area at work that is tuned to sky news and this afternoon I saw the awe inspiring sight of water spilling out from the Three Gorges Dam. The announcer was commenting that they hope it holds as there are millions of families downstream from it. Just think if a weather event like this had happened four years ago the Olympic Games in Beijing would have been a total washout.

The freebee paper is full of doom and gloom when it comes to the games; yesterday the heat buckled the train track and caused other problem to public transport disrupting transport to and from the games venues. And that was just for the rehearsal of the opening ceremony.

Another gloomy headline was proclaiming that interest rates may fall to zero. That’s for the average Joe of course, we see so much ‘clipping the ticket’. We see such a lot of ripping off and everyone wanting to cream a bit off the top. When we had been in our unit for a year we had a rent review and it went up, not a huge amount, but then we as tenants had to pay a fee to the letting agency to change the amount of rent we pay. Somewhere in an office somebody changed the amount in a  document and printed it and that will be £100 thank you. One of the security guys at work was telling me about how much it is costing him to buy a house. His bank had arranged the mortgage, but the deal fell through. Apparently the seller took it back off the market even though it was unconditional; they can do that over here. Anyway security man says to the bank, Oh dear deal has fallen through, but look here is another house we might be interested in buying. Bank holds its hand out and says there is a fee for arranging the mortgage you know, even if the sale did not go through.

At the place where The Man works he has been repairing some machinery that was previously done by contractors. Said contractors are not very happy about that. The Man’s boss is though. Said contractors added their cut to the cost of the repair. Replace spare part £100 contactors charged £500. The Man had it fixed in half a day, contractors charged a full week to do the same job.

 It is no wonder that the country has no money