A big whinge



I've been preoccupied for some weeks now with organising an event that happened last weekend. It went well, and no sooner was I home than the universe revealed to me how considerate it had been: it turns out it had been postponing a number of minor but irritating glitches until I had the free time and attention to deal with them. Since Monday, then:

• We discovered that our tag for the Harbour Bridge, the Cross City Tunnel and other pay-per-drive features of our fair city was no longer working. Its battery had run out and I had to go to an RTA office to have it replaced. This involved taking a number, waiting half an hour to be served and then being told by the man behind the counter that for e-Tags you don't need a number -- you go straight to counter 10. So I went and stood in the queue at Counter 10 where a very nice woman with her name tag on upside down gave me a form to fill out ... etcetera. But I shouldn't complain: I saw one woman wandering around the office like a lost soul because she hadn't cracked the system that told us when our number was up, and had missed her turn; another woman let her in ahead of her and goodnaturedly avoided missing her turn as a result, only to storm out of the office about 15 minutes later when asked some question for the fifth time.

• New phone lines needed to be connected and old ones rationalised. I've spent more than two hours on the phone to Telstra, 93 minutes of that time in one phone call, during which I spoke to four consultants and started from scratch with each one. Somehow as a result of these calls our broadband connection was accidentally cut off from Tuesday until (we're promise) next Monday -- without warning, explanation, apology or recompense. On instruction from a Telstra consultant, I lined up an electrician to do a couple of hundred dollars worth of work on Friday afternoon, only to receive a text from Telstra on Thursday 'reminding' me of an appointment on Friday morning which they told me, when I phoned them, was for one of their technicians to come and do that job. I called the electrician to cancel, and he was remarkably sanguine about having the job pulled out from under him. (I recommend him: Never Touch Electrical.) The Telstra guy came yesterday, on time, and put in the necessary socket. He was friendly, generous with his time, and genially tolerant of our little dog guest, who time and again positioned himself, tail thumping, exactly where the electrician needed to be. Meanwhile, I'm driving to my nearest U-Connect cafe a couple of times a day to do email etc.

• The washing machine went completely dead on Monday, less than three months out of warranty. A very nice technician came and said that the company (Miele) is lenient when something goes wrong so soon after warranty is up, and will almost certainly not require payment. Otherwise when he comes back (on Monday?) with a new motherboard or whatever we would have been up for $500 or more plus labour. I had come home from the weekend with four sets of sheets needing to be washed: the dirty laundry is approaching critical mass.

• I've finally had a sleep test to see if my snoring, a cause of significant marital tension, is something that can be treated, and perhaps more significantly, to search for a possible remedy for my seemingly permanent tiredness ('diurnal somnolence', my GP called it). This was pretty much a non-event, but I did take a couple of pics of myself all wired up in my jamies. When I phoned one of them to Penny she said she'd always loved me for my homicidal maniac looks:





• As a tiny grace note, the smoke alarm ran out of battery as I was starting this, and screamed shrilly for a new one.

Posted: Sat - March 7, 2009 at 11:10 AM           |

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