wabson

Lesson number one: don’t lie to your customers.

So I phoned up Orange last night, having decided I’d give them one more chance to prove their worth before switching my allegance to a provider that didn’t charge me nearly £70 for a slightly-above average month’s worth of usage. Apparently they could add a few more inclusive minutes onto one of those silly animal packages off their web site, but still nothing close to the offer from 3 that I ended up signing up for today.

I explained that if it helped I was happy not to have a new mobile phone from them, if it helped bring down the monthly cost a little. After all, I’d be saving them at least £200 by not demanding the latest N70 from them for free, having only had my current phone for just over a year and quite liking it, thank you very much.

No go, apparently. Something about me being within my contract still and having to sign up for another one if I want to change my price plan before June. New contact equals new phone. Right.

So despite not really wanting a new phone, I now have a new Sony Ericsson K610i sitting next to me on the surface, ready for when my 3 contract begins next month (apparently you can delay the start of it by 30 days, rather like a student wanting to go to Africa before starting Uni, but in this case for me who wants to live out the remaining 7 weeks of my Orange contract before switching). Unfortunately my old Nokia 6230 just isn’t good enough for the blisteringly fast 3G connections required these days…

The new phone isn’t the latest model there is around, but it’s still a phone. I can make calls, receive calls and do a couple of pointless other things with it should I have the urge. It’s not “reconditioned”, as Orange assured me it would be when I spoke to them about disconnecting yesterday, a clear exegerration of the truth that actually made me more determined to leave, not less.

I was reading yesterday in the Observer that apparently people replace their mobile phones every eighteen months. Hardly surprising really, given how difficult it is not to do so. There was a time when wooing me with new shiny things would have persuaded me to put up with the bum price plan I was on, but not any more. Now I get to spend the extra £30 a month on other exciting things, like car insurance. Mmm.

Loving: Sitting on the river, drinking wine. Drinking lots of water now.

From a conversation overheard in a random pub on Thursday night, as two men discuss their gay friend and their own love life woes.

Man 1 to Man 2: If I were gay and you were gay, I’d shag you.

Man 2: (Drinks pint)

So, according to NHS Direct:

You may have gastroenteritis or food poisoning. If it is very mild, avoid solid food and milk for a day and drink only non-alcoholic fluids. Your pharmacist will advise you about medicines to stop diarrhoea (find your nearest pharmacist). If it is severe or there is also pain, or blood in your bowel motions, call NHS Direct.

A great example of when having a concise medical description of your condition can actually end up making you feel worse about it rather than better. Still, apparently my condition is “safe to manage at home”, meaning I guess, “don’t bother calling us unless it gets worse”.

Maybe I shouldn’t have gone into work yesterday after all. But the flat was a tip after the day before, when my day of working from home had turned into a morning of answering a couple of emails followed by lots of falling asleep for the following 18 hours.

So this weekend I will be resting by mostly not leaving the flat, aside from the occasional trip down the road to buy more bread and soup. Maybe it’s good practice for later on in life when I discover that I can no longer leave the house and have become dependent on a laptop computer and old episodes of the O.C. to keep myself sane.

I’d like to think that when I reach the grand age of one-squillion-and-one - or however old we end up living until no doubt much to the Government’s consternation - I’ll have better things to amuse myself with than watching the moment where Marissa dies over and over again, but I probably won’t. Imagine how dated Ryan’s hair will look by then though. Wow.

Thank you for taking the time to install four new shiny ticket machines at Ealing Broadway main line station last week. I had thought that you didn’t give two hoots about the plight of the unfortunate souls who like me have to queue up every morning at the single working machine in order to buy a ticket to get them to work - but although you never answered the nice letter I sent you on the topic back in August you obviously were listening after all.

Unfortunately, I missed the chaos that I imagine must have ensued whilst these works being carried out but I’m sure you will be glad that I did however witness the full-blown horror of humanity’s at best awkward interaction with touch-screen technology as I tried to get in to work this morning. No doubt you will be pleased to hear that that single long queue of people at the only working machine had gone, replaced instead by four huge queues going out the door, one from each machine. It really was fun watching the whole situation unfold in front of me as I stood in the fifth queue to buy my ticket off a real human being.

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll try out this new-fangled technology myself. I’m not sure whether being stuck behind someone struggling to deal with the intricacies of Chip and PIN will be more or less fun than having someone who can’t understand why machine that won’t accept their twenty pound note in payment for a ticket costing less than ten pounds when it states quite clearly on the front of it that it doesn’t give more than ten pounds in change in front of you, but I look forward to finding out.

Don’t worry about writing back - it’s fine.

Warm regards,

Will.

Things that have been good this weekend:

• The slides! Although slightly short-lived. Next time we’ll book.
• Sorting through paperwork and other random stuff from the last four years of my life
• Wandering around Greenwich in the rain, and taking shelter in a small cafe called Pistachios, which turned out to be more gay than gay-friendly
• And miscelleneous things: Chicken jalfrezi, Sunday lunch, white wine, Cointreau over ice and the O.C.

And generally being in London.

They had carrier bags in 1930, right?

Highlights of this weekend’s activities in Leam have included the following:

• Picnics in Jephson Gardens
• Home-made canelloni and classy cocktails in Bar 44
• Falling out with a Tesco self-scan machine
• Much hilarious retro picture taking

Certainly worth the hot, uncomfortable and crowded trains to get there and back (silly engineering work!). Now I’m off to cook some dinner.

Today, the training began in earnest for the Nike 10K in October - not that I enjoy copying people, I just don’t like to be left out.

Despite not wanting this to be a “look how fit I am!” blog entry, I’ll skip right to the figures, which I’m bound to forget within a couple of days if I don’t record them now. So -

Total Distance = 6.4 km

Total time = 37:17 = 0.621 hours

Average Speed = 6.4 / 0.621 = 10.3 km/h

This brings back nasty memories of GCSE exams. Speed equals distance over time. Indeed.

And here’s the map:

OK, so now it’s really back again. Honest

I between migrating my company’s primary web site onto a non-broken server, this weekend’s activities have included a wander around the French market that’s been resident on the Green over the last few days and a token appearance at the Jazz enclosure in Walpole Park (next year, we’ll make a day of it). Perhaps not quite as impressive as last Sunday’s promming adventure, but it’s better than bumming around the flat.

Also, I’m now more than half-way though the Da Vinci Code. Thankfully. The single-threaded story and the lack of barely any background beyond the cobbled-together history behind it is starting to become a little tiresome. As is the relentless pace at which Dan Brown seems intent on telling the tale and his unapologetic yet frequent mis-spelling of the English language. Only two hundred more pages to go…

It’s back again.

Laurie - I’m really grateful to you for holding the reins for the last twelve months (scarily it’s almost a year exactly since I buggered off around the world and left Planet Afterlife to fend for itself). But it’s time I stated taking some responsibility myself, once again.

The feed list has been optimised and the design improved. Further changes are in the pipeline, too. But for the moment, it works :-).