Life in the Professional Underclass

Thursday, 19 December 2002

[This is another of those long posts that I've had to split into several sections to cope with blogger limitations. This time I've resorted to ellipses at the end of the individual posts and as titles to provide the links. The last in the series is also marked with a suitable typographical device].

About six months ago, I had to attend the Residential Tenancies Tribunal. I was behind in my rent and the bank which had the dregs of my superannuation in its grasping clutches was playing silly buggers about the severe financial hardship I needed to prove so that I could get back enough money to settle my back rent and fund a move "down market".

I was at the bottom of a declining spiral of not quite having the money or time to move and knowing that staying in the present place was slowly driving me broke. In a situation like that your thinking can get woolly and the efforts to find work take on a desperate edge. The flawed logic is that if you can just get your landlord to carry you for the week or two it will take to get back in work, you can put enough by to cover the bond on a new place and the moving expenses. It doesn't help if you have the experience of having pulled the same trick off a couple of times before to help support the delusion. You hit bottom hard and it's time to put an end to the denial and self-delusion of genteel poverty.

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