BecomingJulie
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Nov 28, 2010
- Messages
- 4,323
I was particularly proud of it. But the best fun I had with the limited computing power at my disposal -- an Amiga 500 with a clock speed of nearly 8 MHz, a thwacking great two point five megabytes of RAM and a hard disk drive, and an Amstrad NC100 "notepad" computer with just 64 kilobytes of RAM plus 128kB of ROM containing the built-in word processor, dictionary, BASIC programming language and some simple apps like a calculator, address book and diary and a terminal emulator with the ability to transfer files to another computer with a serial port -- must have been the "New Age Travel Agency -- your trip will be sorted with us" scam, i.e. printing my own bus tickets.
It started with a simple enough experiment, as follows: Print a return ticket ("Ticket A") issued in town, to the stop in my village and back, earlier that same morning; and another return ticket ("Ticket B") issued in my village to town and back, again that day. There were helpful "Know Your ticket" posters on the bus telling you what all the different groups of letters, figures and symbols represented (boarding stage, service number, vehicle number and so forth -- basically a complete how-to guide for the aspiring forger. And I had plenty of examples of real bus tickets (with the vehicle numbers used on that route, plus the corect fare stage numbers ) to work from. Then board a bus in the village, presenting ticket A to the driver. As far as anyone was concerned, I was simply using a return ticket for the return journey, to go back to the City. (This required some care in the choice of timings, since it obvously must not be the exact same vehicle witn the exact same driver, lest they remember not issuing any ticket to any crazy hippy freak type person wearing ripped jeans over multi-coloured leggings and army surplus boots earlier that day.) Then, after enjoying a day in town, I presented ticket B, to go back home to the village.
Well! The buzz of having my crude self-printed bus ticket accepted as genuine by the driver was well up to the standard of any drug. It was as though there was an orange sun inside my body, and its light was shining out through each of the pores in my skin. (The same phenomenon occurred the first time an inspector boarded the bus on which I was travelling, examined my ticket and passed it back to me without a word, just a
I reckon I probably took the local bus companies for about £4000 - 5000 worth (at 1995 - 98 rates), all told, with some help from a few friends. In the end, it was ruined by carelessness; as most things seem to tend to be, ultimately. I'm not blaming **** because it could just as easily have been **** or me who got about as lucky as someone getting unlucky can get. It was a blast while it lasted, but it had its course to run.
There was another idea I had involving forged bus tickets, that -- if, and only if, it worked -- could have netted a few dozen crisp tenners for a friend and me over the course of a day; but this one was really too dangerous, and we chickened out. Well, what it was more like was, we tried Dutch courage; but we were already far too wrecked to proceed before either of us managed to persuade the other that it was anything but a one-way ticket to prison .....
I get my electricity from E-On, formerly PowerGen, even more formerly East Midlands Electricity. When I signed up for a supply, I was fully expecting Labour to win the next election, and then immediately renationalise the Utilities privatised by Thatcher. And I suspected that anyone who had trtied to milk it by switching suppliers might get hit with some form of sanctions, so I purposefully remained loyal to my original supplier.
As it turned out, Labour only acted like the Conservative 2nd XI; and now energy prices are rising, due to chronic under-investment in renewables (and one day, remewable energy sources will be the only sources there are[/i]) consumers are being actively encouraged by the government to switch suppliers, making the problem worse for themselves and everybody else.
The only change I have had, besides the usual creeping inflation and replacement of the old card meter with a key meter, was coming off Economy Seven (they found out somehow that I had replaced the night storage heaters with a gas boiler and radiators), and they did that by instructing their npayment machines to re-program my key so the night rate was the same as the day rate. Which would have sucked badly for anyone, say, having a hydroponics operation up and running at the time, taking full advantage of the seven hours' cut-price juice to grow a crop of Sensi Star or anything ..... cute, innocent schoolgirl smile; eyelashes flutter; nervous giggle. I get paid about 20p. per kWh I generate, whether or not I use it myself (and it's injected downstream of the consumption meter; so if I am using only solar electricity, the meter does not count down at all, so it's cheaper than free -- even if I have to draw some power from the grid to supplement the solar panels' output, I only have to pay for the difference between what I used from the grid and what I made myself).
Tl;dr: I saved money on my electricity bills by not switching my supplier.
