Okay, so I’m being a little melodramatic, but it would be fair to say that Wednesday didn’t exactly go according to plan. Quite substantially not according to plan…
The last few weeks have been a bit hectic here: the Smart Flyer pre-orders needed finishing and shipping (done); workshop upgrade (done, stage 1 at least); VAT return (done); Corporation Tax (done); Annual accounts (done, I thought). My plan was for this to be something of a triumphant blog post in which I got to be a bit chuffed with myself, and show off some before and after pictures. Okay, to be fair: chuffed with myself and very grateful to my Dad, who came over from the US for a week to help me build the workshop. And visit his granddaughter, obviously. Now I think about it, that was probably why he was so easily persuaded to come over.
Anyway, everything was looking pretty positive until Wednesday when ill-fortune struck. It all started well enough, until I opened the morning’s post. In it was a letter from Companies’ House saying that my annual accounts have been rejected, and that since it is now after the filing deadline, I’m going to be fined. Having broken out in a cold sweat, I checked through to see why. The reason? Apparently the wording for the bit about audit exemption for small companies has changed, and I used the old version. You would imagine that there are substantial changes, sufficient to warrant a fine, wouldn’t you? You’d be wrong – it says exactly the same thing, imposes exactly the same responsibilities on the directors, provides exactly the same exemption. In other words, what it is is a burning hoop of red tape used to scam companies out of some money. And it’s badly written. Judging from the grammar the new wording was presumably constructed by a slightly slow toddler. One that was having a bad day. The final sting on the whole sorry episode is that I would have automatically had compliant accounts this year because I tried to use the Companies’ House automatically generated electronically filed accounts. Tried and failed. I don’t think it was user error – everything worked apart from the submit button, and there’s really only one way to use a submit button. It failed to work for 48 hours straight before I simply gave up and used my existing forms, hence the old version of the wording.
Well, whining about it would simply do no good, I figure, so I got the revisions made and moved on with my life. Out to the workshop to work on some spinner parts. Should be a joy. It’s a really nice space to work in now. Should be a joy, and was until my table saw suffered a catastrophic failure. I don’t think I’m being melodramatic with the ‘catastrophic’ part. There was a horrific clanking noise, followed by a foot long column of sparks. Not a great idea in a machine designed for producing sawdust. Stripping the machine down, I found the problem that the main motor bearing had ruptured, flinging it’s steel balls all round the inside of the machine, not least into the actual motor housing. You can imagine exactly how much good that did it!
The rest of the afternoon progressed in a blurry haze of catching my fingers with tools, minor cuts from a varnish bottle (!), walking into, tripping up on, and generally coming to grief with various parts of my environment. More or less the culmination was in the late evening while relaxing in front of the telly I laughed at something and managed to spill coffee on myself. Time to give up and go to bed I figured – just before needing 3 attempts to successfully get the seal off the new tube of toothpaste. Oh dear.
So with my karma suitably rebalanced I fully plan to get up, dust myself off and emerge stronger and wiser, or at least with a shiny new table saw and a sharper eye on Companies’s House!