550,000 tones of direct mail were posted in the UK last year. With a multiple of 17 trees per one ton of paper, we can conclude, in excess of nine million trees were cut down, pulped and distributed into our letter boxes as 21 billion individual pieces of junk mail.. This excludes hand delivered items, such as free newspapers.

In the UK, unless you have ticked column six on your electoral register, your details will be sold by your district council. And the price is a steal. It costs just £20 for the register and then only £1.50 per thousand entries, valuing your personal data at just over .15 of a penny. The full register, which you have no choice of not being on, is available at the same price. The full register can only be used for a few defined purposes. One of these defined purposes, is to help establish a persons credit status, by credit reference agencies.

The fact I'm not on the edited register and still receive junk mail offering me credit cards, personally addressed to me, does make me wonder where these financial institutions acquired my info.

However, with identity theft in the UK reported to cost £1.7billion, the thing that really rankles me about it is that I have to individually shred the addressed junk mail with a household shredder. Not having the time to do this during the week, it becomes an incredibly annoying and unpaid weekend chore. At least with the free newspapers I can pick them up off the floor and put them straight into the recycle bin.

Some days you can feel completely overwhelmed by the amount of sales and marketing you can't seem to avoid. Everything is vying to grab your attention, headlines, bill boards, junk mail, phone calls from mobile phone companies, door to door salesmen, the Kleeneze catalogue, roofers, meter readers... and did I mention email? Don't get me started....

We're not always functioning at our full 40%. Sometimes we go into auto pilot and, for all intents and purposes, are pretty much switched off. Some things are so familiar to us we don't think about them. Our expectations are so strong about the outcome we don't expect anything different to happen. You go into Tescos, you fill your trolley, you come home and put things away. Only then do you discover the rotten apple in the bag or that the best before end date is only a few hours away. To compound your mood, your annoyance is directed at yourself for not paying attention rather than the vendor, who has taken money from you for something you can't eat..

Bad Apple in Bag

Bad Apple Portrait

The Good Ones

For legal reasons I should add. I did buy a bag of apples today from Tesco. The bag contained one bad apple, the rest were intact. The evidence is pictured above. I didn't buy anything with an expiry date about to occur.

Why would anyone write a program that..........

Why would anyone write a program that would automatically restart your computer? A program so persistent that, when you click "Restart Later",  you only get a moratorium of ten minutes before the message pops up again with the same determined prompt? Every ten minutes, as though it were taking orders from the atomic clock. The message gives you five minutes to act. This is less time than it takes to go to the toilet, make a coffee and return to your desk. In which time, the relentless program has shut your computer, ignoring your unsaved work, like the spreadsheet or letter you've been painfully composing.

It doesn't even take a trip to the toilet.  You might be retrieving a file, or talking to someone or pacing the room on your mobile. Why would someone write a program that can restart you computer, and wipe your work, as you do that?

Before anyone says, "Well, you can change the settings", I already know that, and that's part of the problem. In an age of hot desking and shared computers you inherit the settings of previous users. Some, not unsurprisingly, might select the recommended setting, which will run this program.

For those that might not know how to change their setting click Start followed by Control Panel. Look for the icon below and double click.

Change the settings. My preferred setting as pictured below is to not download automatically. I like to decide what to install and run on my machine. I learned this after installing Service Pack 2, to discover afterwards my DVD drive didn't work anymore as there were no supported drivers.

All I wanted to do was book a cheap flight. Surely this should be a simple operation on the internet. I've done it so many times before; you select your dates, you modify your preferences, you go ahead and book the flight.

I get to the familiar easyjet screen, pictured below. I click "Show Flights"

At this point I'm expecting to be taken to a screen where I can look at flight options, instead the following alert pops up.

I click ok, the only option and back at the familiar screen

I click "Show Flights"

At this point I'm expecting to be taken to a screen where I can look at flight options, instead the following alert pops up.

I click ok, the only option and back at the familiar screen

I click "Show Flights"

........oddly, as I type Ryanair into my address bar these words from Yeats drift into mind "Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start". The words are from "The Circus Animals Desertion" Ah, maybe thats the connection

In late April I acquired a dedicated server from an internet hosting company and paid for three months in advance. The price for the quarter was £211.47 (including VAT). Stupidly, I hadn't looked at my bank statements until today, to discover, the company, due to an obvious accounting error, have been debiting my bank account each month since April for £211.47, leading to an overpayment of just under £1,000 even though I had cancelled the server after a week of use because the solution was unworkable.

Interestingly, this aim listed company, reports a 46% increase in profits for its last financial year.

Notwithstanding the fact I hadn't authorised the company to debit my account at all (that's another story), the fact it occurred is a reminder, that:

Recurring payments on your credit cards are the same. Some companies will automatically renew your purchase without advising you, and make it particularly difficult to cancel. I remember it taking months to stop AOL direct debits.

When I joined Ecademy, the social business network,  I paid the twelve month subscription fee in advance. I  lost interest in the network after a few months and stopped using it. On the anniversary of my joining, Ecademy renewed the subscription automatically. The first I knew of it was seeing the debit on my bank statement. The next year they tried to do the same, but as I had changed my card the payment failed. I then started to receive a series of automatically generated emails. These lasted for a few weeks and then stopped. This was the sum of the Ecademy customer service experience.

Most companies rely on our complacency. We don't study our bank statements and transactions or manage our cash as we should. With recurring payments and automatic renewals you may not get the best deal. This is particularly so with car or home insurance. If your car insurance is on an automatic renewal, you're unlikely to get the best deal.

Three last points:

• When a company already has your money your bargaining power is weak.
• If you ever run into cashflow difficulties, your bank will score on charges as they bounce your direct debits.
• The key benefits are enjoyed, not by you, but by the companies you buy from.