No.46: Do ‘Optimism Sums’

You never have any money.

Now, ignore this phrase and read on in a state of vehement denial. 

Welcome to the financial existence of the flancer.

If Flancerland existed, it would have no capital. That will be only funny if you have just opened your bank statement and are feeling hysterical.

However, now is the perfect time to do some ‘Optimism Sums’!

These consist of the sort of mathematical spin-doctorings that would  make Le Chiffre from Casino Royale’s eye bleed and which miraculously make cash appear after a series of complex equations written on the back of an old Tesco receipt.

[PC] – IE (fDD) + MNSR/4 =  A (- R)

This, dear work*-free readers is a highly sophisticated algebraic formula that, whomever the flancer might be, will have been applied to their finances at some point. Usually after a big cry.

[Purse contents] MINUS Imagined Expenditure (forgetting all direct debits) PLUS money not spent on a round DIVIDED BY no. of people in the pub = Assets. (Minus Reality.)

Not exactly NASA standard in it’s accuracy but the flancer rejoices that things are not as bad as they seemed and continues to believe in the old Buddhist adage that:

 “If the letters OD appear after your account balance but you never open the statement envelope, does it really make a sound?”

 ‘Right.  I can sell my liver on eBay for…seventy quid…and I didn’t buy that bag I liked from topshop.com. And I bought the Value range raspberry jam this afternoon. So I am actually one hundred pounds in the black and therefore needn’t worry about my financial state for another month. Ah Ha! Take that Natwest**!’

The bank however, has other ideas based on the reality of, well, reality. Which is a bit of a spanner in the works for the flancer who is puzzled as to why, after working out that they have only actually spent twenty pounds this month on their fingers on the bus fifteen minutes ago, the hole in the wall won’t put out.

They go storming into the bank before a navy polyester-wearing individual explains why, using a calculator and some proof. 

But they didn’t incorporate the back of a Tesco receipt.  So it doesn’t count, of course.

TODAY’S FOOTNOTES:

*Substitute any of the following words: money, pride, new-clothing, thrifty.

**or whichever organisation looks after the space where your money should be.

No.38: Make Your Own Christmas Presents

‘Waste time and save money? Show me the Sellotape!’ enthuses the flancer unfortunately for everyone they are considering giving a gift to this year. It was a flancer whom clearly invented the phrase ‘it’s the thought that counts’, stealthily insinuating it into the common belief system so that it would be the disappointed recipient of the shit, home-knitted doily who is the bad person – not the tight-arse that didn’t just buy them a £2 bottle of wine.

Like the Millennium Dome, hand-made christmas presents take ages to construct and tend to have no real purpose.   Aside from cluttering up the home of the recipient, who keeps the ‘frightening sculpture made of wood and covered with cut-out holly*’  fearing a deep and enduring guilt that plagues anyone who dares put a hand-made gift in the bin. 

Unfortunately, crafty presents made by anybody except really talented, arty types tend to be ugly and glittery and often sport inexplicable bobbles or tassels, like  something scraped from the bottom of an ageing transvestite’s make up bag.

However, from the flancer’s point of view, this present making lark is joy.  They are in their element, glueing and crocheting and weaving something from Santa’s reject bin of tat, listening to carols and swigging energetically from an £8 bottle of Lidl sherry.

They may – if you’re really unlucky –   decide to make their own cards as well. If a flancer gives you a Christmas card, best play it safe. Do not say, for instance:  ‘oooh! how public-spirited you are buying those charity cards by disabled people who paint with their feet!  I love groups of nuns – how christmassy!’ as the flancer probably spent five hours at it and meant it to be a group of penguins.

However, any hand-made thingy is better than a body lotion/shower gel/bathsalts and shower poouf set**  because nothing says: ‘You’re irrelevant to me’  like one of them.

TODAYS FOOTNOTES

*Or ‘Festive Wine Rack’ as the flancer would have it.

**These sets always  smell exactly the same –  like a scented candle from a pound-shop.  And every woman has at least three shower pooufs hanging over a tap somewhere in their home, which never seem to dry out and probably take four hundred years to biodegrade.

No.34: Try and Find A Bank Card That’ll be Accepted at The Supermarket

Flancers have two life dreams: (1) to be published. And (2) that the first card they pull out to pay for anything will actually work. Not especially in that order.

Non-flancer-writey people seem to have this gargantuan misconception that people who freelance make enormous mountains of money.  So mountainous in fact, that they probably also believe that the flancer regularly empties it onto the bed and rolls around in it in a gold bikini drinking Champagne from a unicorn’s hoof.

This may in part be due to Carrie (Bradshaw, the cake-deficient designer-draped mammal. Not the blood-soaked, telekinetic Stephen King one) or any other Hollywood cinematic flancer character  flouncing out of C. Dior with an elbow full of designer truck, jumping in a cab to go home and poke at a brand new ibook for five minutes.

In reality?  Carrie would be a potty-mouthed cynic, sweating out Nescafe, dropping crumbs from a Nutella and bacon sandwich all over a vintage Dell that takes forty-five minutes to fire up (see post.27).   Her biggest daily concern would be whether to bother washing her filthy hair as she’s unlikely to go out for at least another two days.* She would only wear Jimmy Choo footwear if he did slippers.

When I bemoan the echoing chasm of doom that is my monetary fund, my friends make this sort of ‘pffft!’ noise adding, ‘but you’re a writer!  You lot are loaded!’ Granted, most days I resemble the millionaire, Sir B. Geldof.   But I am willing to bet that he doesn’t stand at the cash point on the verge of tears every other day or get that vomity feeling when he hands over his card in Tescos for a shop of tampons and milk  totaling a mere £3.75.

Warning: A distressing reconstruction follows.

If you have never stood behind a flancer in a supermarket who is suffering from a nasty case of skint, here’s what usually happens: the nice till lady will look at the flancer with motherly pity** and convey the news with funeral directorly regret that the card hasn’t been accepted. The flancer will look aghast and, shaking their head, will say something like ‘oh! That’s funny, there’s plenty of money in there.***’ 

(As if the other customers care. They just want the poor person in the pyjama bottoms and Primark Ugg boots to get a frikkin’ move on as they have casseroles to get home and put on.)

There will be lots of sighing and huffing from the flancer, who will pull out another card and hand it over in desperation like an under-qualified magician fluffing valiantly though a failing trick.  To which the nice till lady will shake her head like a surgeon conveying news of a death to a family waiting anxiously in A&E.

Having only a Blockbuster Membership card left (which is only to be handed over in the event of full-mental breakdown) the Emergency Credit Card comes out.  It was signed up  for  in order to deal with serious emergencies – i.e. needing to fly out of Columbia if a war starts or something when you’re travelling.  But it is regularly used for other emergencies like, buying milk or Christmas party shoes.  

The Emergency Credit Card works, their gut relaxes and the flancer slinks away, red-faced clutching their booty of Nutella and smoked back. Which has ironically just cost them £126.78 after bank charges.

In the car park, the flancer resolves to go and give the bank a piece of their mind for this gross mistake and their subsequent embarrassment. They storm to Natwest, print out a mini statement and suddenly  realise that their complaint is as valid as Ratner shares.

They decide to go and buy themselves a coffee with their Blockbuster Membership card as consolation.

 TODAY’S FOOTNOTES:

*This could just be me. Apologies to any hygienic flancers reading.

**regional supermarkets only. If you live in a big city they just look at you with scorn. They may even laugh in your face like a panto baddy.

***IE. twenty pounds left of the overdraft.

No.31: Pitch To Someone Totally Random

You’ve run out of money. You have just received a final written warning from the local swimming baths for yet again attempting to pass off a car-wash token as a pound in their coffee vending machine.  Your confidence is so low, you believe that a piece of over-ripe fruit could write a better piece of editorial than you ever could. Plus, your inability to generate gainful employment obviously comes with the associated assumptions of the paranoid, out-of-work-creative, namely: your parents never wanted you, the sexually active world-at-large has placed an international  embargo your under-organs, your hair never lays flat and you daren’t search Facebook because you know that there will be a group entitled: ‘HateThis Flancer’ [accompanied by your picture].  All your exes/employers/family members will have joined it, as will the woman from downstairs whom you’ve only met once.

And so, you pitch to the Magazine You Have no Business pitching to.

This blog post, I might add, is NOT in any way borne of a belief that one publication is better than another. The point is this: flancers sometimes get so desperate to work/earn they will step out of their area of expertise and brazenly venture into the publicational Hinterland of the niche magazine: Quantum Physics Bulletin, Neuro-Surgeon’s World or  Miniature China Animals Gazette.

IE into magazine-flavoured waters they know precisely jack shat about.

‘Well, I’ve seen a miniature china animal,’ protests the delusionally desperate flancer, as they eat all that there is left in the house  (a packet of biscuits as old as Terry Wogan) to maintain energy levels, thanks to the bastards at the swimming baths having curtailed the illicit coffee supply.  And decide that they will simply re-market their total and utter  inexperience of animals, small, china or otherwise as ‘a new spin from an outsider!’ 

They will then plough all of their creative frustration into eight or maybe nine of the worst ideas ever come up with by anybody in the history of the planet (including the people who make air-freshener adverts) and send them off, rubbing their hands together at their cunning. ‘No other flancers will be doing this and I will have the monopoly!’ they cackle, like an inmate of a rubber-walled hospital for the utterly idiotic. 

Unsurprisingly, their genius feature idea for ‘clever verbal negotiating tactics for securing a knock-down bargain price from a wiley miniature pottery animal vendor!’ (cunning re titled: ‘Bull in a China Shop’) is just not the MCAG features desk’s sort of thing. Having now been rejected by MCAG, the flancer momentarily considers The Official Gazette of the Slovenian Society for Sautéed Potatoes and Onions* before getting a grip and taking a week off.

TODAY’S FOOTNOTES:

*An actual real-life publication. If you have submitted to this magazine I would be delighted to hear from you.

 

No.28: Justify Your ‘Job’ to your Parents

As previously pointed out, the question ‘how’s work at the moment?’ is feared and loathed by flancers worldwide. But it is particularly horrorsome when asked by a parent.

Especially when you have called them to borrow money.

‘How are things?’ blithely asks The Mum.  You mumble ‘ok’ whilst trying not to break down over the truth which is that – only ten minutes ago – you were contemplating laying down in the gas oven due to an all-time workless low. The Mum isn’t fooled. She can hear in your voice that things are a bit rum. She distracts you by twittering pleasantly about the nasty hanging baskets Shelia from across the road has put out and laughs at herself for being a curtain twitcher (hey, you can relate, see post No.15). She asks how your friends with jobs are getting on at work (The Mum needs to show interest in a child’s life. And seeing as her child has been virtually unemployed and single for five years – any child will do. But The Mum knows that asking about your life will only upset or embarrass you further, and so she makes this adjustment without realising that this just makes things worse.  Until of course she asks you about the married friends and their new-born children.)

‘Would you like to speak to your dad?’ she asks. All pretence is over.

The dad pulls no punches* and immediately after asking ‘how you’re keeping’ will ask you how you are for money. His gently hectoring tone suggests that any chance of a loan is off, so you reply, ‘fine’ swiftly followed by thinking, *shit!* as you remember that The cunning Dad probably opens your bank statements, as virtually every flancer has used their parents’ home address as their fixed address since university in order to get loans and credit cards. Which, in retrospect is pretty bad because that’s where the bailiff will go first.  The Dad will ‘hmm’ enigmatically and ask about work. You will fluff somewhat and try and distract him by talking about the flashy book/script/project you are working on. This bluster impresses many, but cuts no cheese with The  Dad; who is all about  mortgage and cold hard cash under the mattress. He asks if you need money. You say no. He will ‘hmm’ again and ask what you’re doing today (seeing as you’ve called them at like, 3pm) The honest answer being ‘nothing’, you throw him off the scent by talking about a proper job you were considering getting. He will demand details. You will not have them.

Then you realise that you have a coffee date you are late for. But telling The Dad that you don’t have time to explain how poor and workless you are because you have to go out and dispose of your non-existant disposable income  will further secure your place in the ‘WRITE THIS OFFSPRING OUT OF THE WILL’ file. The Dad senses that you are ready to go and despite everything sends his love (as does mum from the background.) You can hear the theme tune to Murder She Wrote and the kettle whistling.

‘I’ll pop a bit in your account today,’ says Dad. And as you put the phone down trying not to sob, you swear to yourself that when your book sells its first million – before anything else – you will buy that man a sports car.

 

TODAYS FOOTNOTES

*Dads hate using the phone and talking to their children – even if their children are millionaire entrepreneurs. They just do. If ever you call home and your dad picks up, within twenty seconds he’ll usually say: ‘I’ll put your mum on’

No.22: Feel Guilty about Having a Nice Time

When you don’t have any work, the theory goes that if you do not spend every waking hour seeking work you are the worst kind of lay-about waster. That you somehow deserve to be mercilessly flagellated with the flex of your own, inert laptop over the metaphorical thigh of the Grafting Classes. That you are a parasite, living off the good-will and stolen refrigerator contents of those that love you; your jobless, good-for-nothing backside growing fatter by the day on stolen Cornflakes and surreptitiously liberated chocolate that some other tax-payer provided for your enjoyment.

But enough of these Daily Mail rantings. The (slightly less foaming-at-the-mouth with outrage) truth of the matter is, as a workless flancer, given the opportunity of a nice day out (as opposed to weeping gently over your bank statements) you are torn.  Torn between gleefully skipping out of the house (away from the nasty bank statements) and the broodingly intense guilt born of illicitly enjoying yourself when you should be coming up with better ways of generating cash than rooting around  in the washing machine door seal.

On some level, perhaps the more superstitious flancer feels that this devil-may-care frivolity will anger the Employment Gods further, resulting in another month of cleaning the bathroom walls* with a toothbrush just for SOMETHING to do (before realising that was your only toothbrush and you can’t afford a new one).   Perhaps others feel that in having ‘fun’ they will lose the motivational terror that results in every  feature editor’s  in-box haemorrhaging under the influx of 347 of their desperate ideas at least twice a week. Perhaps being in a situation that results in the thought:  ‘I really shouldn’t be at Alton Towers on a Tuesday…’ is just plain depressing.

And so, you people who intend to lure a flancer from their misery with a charming proposal, bear in mind: (1) Avoid alcohol.  Booze + miserable, skint flancer = tantrum and/or earache.  (b) whatever it is you’re doing, make sure it’s a weekend.  Or a Friday, actually. No one in magazine world does anything on a Friday**.

TODAY’S FOOTNOTES: 

*actual act of  flancer-desperation. Thank you AC.

**Or Monday mornings. Or Thursdays for that matter.

No.9: Decide to do something else

There will be a day (usually around the three-week mark. Every month.)  That the flancer wakes up in a cold sweat. And not because they realise they drank a whole bottle of wine to themselves again yesterday.  They will sit up in their tousled sheets and realise, with a wave of nausea (not wine-related) that they MIGHT HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ELSE WITH THEIR LIVES. This is considered hitting rock bottom, as joining the Workforce Proper means full, Workforce Proper hours. Without deadline anxiety toast-scoffing.* Without unfettered social networking and television access.  Without smoking every half hour.  With other people they might hate!

However, on the plus side sits: not becoming borderline agoraphobic, getting dressed before 1.30 in the afternoon, actually having money in the bank without the letters ‘OD’ after them** and finally being able to repay their parents the loan they borrowed in 1995.

Flancers are often accused of being job-shy. This monika often falls from the disapproving lips of a successful, aggressively encouraging parent or live-in partner who does something hideously unnatural, like wear a uniform.   But it’s hard for someone who gets to ‘clock off at the same time every day’ to ‘understand how those seemingly less numerous working hours are more than repaid in stress,’ and that‘ you can’t force the creative process you know. I have actually been <thinking> for the last two days about this piece.’ And that it may ‘appear I sleep in ’til eleven but more than likely I was  up working till 1 am on a deadline the night before.’ Or ‘Ok, I may be on topshop.com <now>, but I’ll be working 17 hours a day when it all floods in next week’.

It’s all relative. Proper-jobbers may protest to never having actually seen this speculative series of events manifest in reality.  But they very easily could.  There is always that risk and if those Doubting Thomases didn’t bugger off at the first sign that they’d be covering both halves of the rent again, they would see it.  Of course, there are flancers who do shift work and any fellow, self-employed creatives admire this sort of ‘coal-face-esque’ grafting. But as a shifting flancer (or ‘freelance scum’ as staffers call them.  To their face of course, as they’d be at home with their feet up watching Trisha in a matter of weeks anyway so why pretend?) the home-shaped light at the end of the office shaped tunnel is always in sight. And you always get paid more than everyone else anyway.

The prospect of giving up working amongst your own personal filth is great wrench for flancers*** , despite the silver lining that brainstorming job alternatives is another excuse to go out and buy stationary and write in it over a cappuccino. And hopefully someone will see you furiously scribbling notes and assume you are a very, high-pressured journalist, as  opposed to the reality which is that you are writing out the pros and cons of becoming a vet.  The biggest obstacle here is that despite a large chunk of flancers being incredibly talented  they can rarely do anything else.  Except perhaps become a GP **** given the hours spent Googling their own ailments.   

Then comes the epiphany that, even in attempting to flee the money-less, misery-fest of journalism, here they are drinking coffee and writing again! Perhaps this is a sign! They cannot escape what they were born to do!  Fighting nature is wrong! And decide to keep on with the glorious struggle, before heading off to the bank to ask for another extension on the overdraft.

 

*because you are not allowed to be seen eating in media offices. This is law.

** Putting through £350 pounds of coffee and sandwiches as ‘entertaining’ can make accountants suspicious. Believe me.

***just look at any staff journalist’s desk and you will see how much they miss it.

 ****Which actually worked for Emma Deeks.

No. 5: Shop Online

Here’s a scenario to which, perhaps, fellow flancers will relate: Turn on computer. Commence daily, work-based, online browse of newspaper/celebrity/gossip sites. Research for a while. Close down computer. Four working days later, receive package from topshop.com.

There is apparently a global recession in full-swing, butneither topshop.com (nor play.com, amazon.co.uk, stationaryfetishistsonline.co.uk. Not forgetting cleaningproductfrenzy.org) will end up another bankruptcy statistic while there are unemployed, resting flancers within spitting distance of a ‘proceed to checkout’ option. Like hearing Snow Patrol in Grey’s Anatomy or seeing a mandarin collar at a footballer’s wedding,  some things are inevitable, nay unavoidable. And shopping online whilst ‘working’ is one of these things. I’m sure psychologists would be able to charge hundreds of pounds for concluding that this  unconscious purchasing, ‘represents a need to be fulfilled; the flancer filling the yawning chasm of worklessness and endless of days of non-human contact with the short-term gratification of  consumerism and the joy of hearing the postman’s grunt echoing up the stairwell as he labours  under the weight of sixteen DVD boxsets.’ 

But this is purely conjecture, obviously. 

Note: in the space of writing this blog, I have bought some wool and knitting needles, a jewellery making kit and a Teach Yourself Spanish CD.

Tomorrow: No.6: Take up a new hobby for less than 12 hours.