Time of the year



OK, it's the last couple of weeks of the year and things always go a bit haywire round about now what with once-a-year phone calls and Post Office queues that stretch out into the street, and I'm thinking of altering my 'Join the Kevolution' T-shirt to read 'Join the 5% Kevolution', but I need to whinge about more individual ills.

A lovely man named Fahd is painting half the inside of our house. He's doing a terrific job, helped on some days by his son Fahd, but there have been delays, some caused by us not being ready for him by the agreed date, then a relative's funeral and a previous commitment that took him away for three days. This has meant that my work room (office?) has been relatively inaccessible, all the furniture piled in the middle of the room. It seemed logical, while things were so disrupted, to avoid a second disruption in a couple of months, to replace my old desk with a larger one I'm inheriting, so just when things could be resuming something like order the pile in the middle of my room degenerated to include two lots of dismembered Ikea (one to be assembled, the other to be given away) and mounds of paper.

Plus there are three bookshelves items we bought from Ikea. This was comparatively painless (compared to the ordeal of previous visits to Rhodes). I'm heading out there again tomorrow because the one item that required assistance from one of the Ikea 'coworkers' turned out to lack significant components when we got it home -- the coworker may have been willing as advertised but sadly turns out not to have been quite up to scratch.

Then there was a schemozzle with our phones and internet: early in November I actually engaged with one of those people who phoned with a fabulous offer of moving up to faster ADSL and embarking on a new package. It didn't work out because life is so much more complicated than I can begin to describe, and when I called to revert to our previous arrangement, well within the cooling off period as far as I was concerned, it turned out that the switch had been totally effected in double quick time. Yesterday was he day when the switch back finally happened, but in the process I lost my Internet connection. Telstra had, I assume unintentionally, stripped the DSL codes out of the phone line and it would take three days and cost $90 to have them 're-provisioned'. The ISP in question had also sent me a bill that included roughly $80 or so for the phone service that was bundled with the new, faster service that I never got to use. I decided to cut my losses, and after talking on the phone to a nice woman in a Capetown call centre and a nice man with an Indian accent in Melbourne, I've moved to a new ISP: it's a five to seven day wait, costs $79 something, and I'll end up with ADSL2 at $10 a month cheaper than I was paying for my painfully slow service. Which means I'm cut off from the Internet, just when I've got deadlines to meet that require much emailing back and forth, and just when Matilda has run a litblog snapshot of this blog! (I commend this series of snapshots to you.)

I'm writing this on Tuesday. I hope I'll have found some friendly Wi-Fi by the end of Wednesday. If you can read this I've been successful.

Posted: Tue - December 16, 2008 at 10:16 PM           |

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