Chris
I'm not writing this for sympathy. I just need to put it somewhere, and the rest of my mates are sick of hearing about it. 👇 I'm Chris Birkin. 40. Nottingham. Marketing manager for eight years. Last role was £3,100 take-home. Two things can happen to you in the same year. March — restructure email. Role made redundant. Eight years. Statutory: £4,200. July — Hannah ended it. Five years together. She moved out the next weekend. I won't get into either. Both were what they were. The thing about both happening in the same year is the maths becomes the problem. I had to move — the flat we shared was hers in everything but name. Solicitor for the tenancy. Deposit on a new place. Removal van. Storage for the bits we'd been arguing over. By August the redundancy money was gone. Got the new job. Better salary actually. But it didn't start until late September. So I had a few weeks of nothing. September the 4th. £180 in the account. Direct debits due the next morning: £520. Went and sat in the new flat that evening. Most of the boxes still in the hallway. Fridge empty except for a takeaway carton from two nights before. Sat on the floor in the living room with a beer. Couldn't sleep. About one in the morning I was on my phone. Scrolling through Facebook. Reading the news. Watching a few reels. Saw a post. Some bloke. Same year. Job and a relationship. Same kind of pause between things — that bit where the money runs out before the recovery starts. He'd tried an app one night. I clicked the link. Lucky Spino. Signed up. Put in £70 — balance doubled straight off. Spun for a while. Up and down. Then a steady slide. Opened the home page. 1,200 people on the busiest game. Bought the bonus round. £15. Multipliers came: ×15 ×80 ×380 ×1,840 Phone vibrated. £27,600. Sat on the floor with the phone for a few minutes. Refreshed. Hit withdraw. Halifax at about half two. £27,600. Direct debits went out the next day. Nothing bounced. By the time the new job star
