Tagged with money

Bus prices are up again

Arriva

There is a lot of political rubbish that has annoyed me of late and has quite possibly made me a very bad person to be around. My girlfriend yesterday informed that the bus prices were going up again by 10p for a single and 20p for a return. For people who don’t use the buses often, that’ll be miniscule to them. For people like me who rely on buses constantly, it’s more money out of our pockets in the long run. It all reminds me of something for wrote for one of my Year 1 pieces at university.

I think I’ll start this off with an anecdote. Picture the scene at 6pm at Woking. I’ve just had an afternoon of shorthand at university (death by squiggles), have had to walk back to the station in the rain, spent 20 minutes on a train looking out into the gloomy, depressive weather outside and have just walked to the bus station expecting a bus to take me home in about 5 minutes.

So I wait…

And wait…

And wait…

And wait…

It’s now 6:20pm and I still haven’t been able to get on a bus that should have been at Woking about 15 minutes ago. I asked a bus driver where the bus was and he said, in craptacular English, “I don’t know.”

So, I’ve spent 20 minutes in the rain (that, may I add, got worse and worse as time went on) waiting for something to take me home and that is your best excuse?

Buses are the sinners of public transport. In the last year, only half of my buses have actually managed to come on time. Forget complaining about trains – they are actually reliable! Why should I pay £4 for a return ticket for such shoddy service?

I’m not excusing the fact we’re being ripped off on trains too but I think in comparison this is a lot worse. I wouldn’t pay £4.40 for such a lousy service.

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Donation

Donation Box

I don’t get paid for any of the writings I do on my own sites. Nearly everything on The Musical Chairs from the hosting to domain name to manual labour of updating is all put in by me and the domain name for this blog was bought by me. Obviously this takes money out of my account (hosting, domains, going to gigs etc) and now that I do not have a part-time job to live on I have to budget enormously, especially in this age of recession. But I don’t the quality of content to lower because of it.

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about adding an option to allow readers to donate money if they really like an article they read on it. However, I don’t want to do this in a way that sounded like either:

  1. Sounded like you must give me money for fear of feeling guilty.
  2. Sounded like it was a sympathy thing.

So in order to combat these issues, the donation box would simply be something on the sidebar, with a short explanation and a maximum donation limit of £1. This is done because, at the end of the day, that is nearly the price you would pay for a quality newspaper and under the price you would pay for a weekly magazine. So the option is there, if a reader wants to. I also find this way of money-making a lot more human and satisfactory than just dumping adverts.

This ultimately brings up the debate about paying for news on the Internet and Walter Isaacson was on The Daily Show recently to talk about his recent cover feature for Time, How To Save Your Newspaper, about whether or not we should pay for news on the internet.

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