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It was a very friendly hearing: the estate agency's rental manager told the Tribunal arbitator what a good tenant I was, and I told the tale of all my calls to the bank's Sydney call centre. The tribunal member asked if an order to pay up or quit within 28 days would help me out in my negotiations with the bank. I said it couldn't hurt. Two days later, I got the eviction order in the mail and faxed it to the bank, thinking that this ought to be it. Any fool ought to be able to see that without my money I'd be looking for a friend's sofa to sleep on in 4 weeks time - or a slightly hyperbolic bridge to sleep under. I hadn't reckoned with the fools they employ in banks. They wanted to carry on playing silly buggers. It's their right under the legislation.

I decided that enough was enough and contacted my local Member of Parliament. I made some phone calls to a couple of those busybody regulatory authorities that governments create in the mistaken belief that interfering in business is sometimes necessary for the benefit of the polity. I finally got a call from the bank asking me an account number so that they could credit the money to it. With that sorted out, I was able to get on with the serious business of packing my souvenirs of upper-middle class life into cardboard boxes and moving out of the pleasant little rental unit I could no longer afford.

If I'd had more time to look I doubt that I'd have settled on my new place quite so quickly. You don't open the windows, you take them out of their frames. They're a bugger to get back in. But the rent is the lowest you can find in this part of the world: the only way to get anything cheaper is to break my "mutual obligations" by moving to an area of high unemployment. I've got together with some friends so that we can tender for serious programming projects and build up a business. It beats leafleting the local milk-bars and pie-shops letting people know that you're an experienced computer professional who can help them out with those egregious features that riddle a certain popular operating system. I saw someone doing just that once, when I was buying a pie. A less jaundiced vision than mine would probably have seen enterprise and initiative where I could only see a sad and familiar desperation.

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