Nothing’s working!! The mower had to go back because it was a wuss (as we say in Australia) a wimp and a limp excuse for a machine. The phone felled itself for some unknown reason and even the washing machine is, literally, on the blink – it keeps shorting out. And the gas hot water system that I had always had a funny feeling didn’t work, managed four whole days before it gasped its last and left me freezing, frustrated and floundering in the dark ages, boiling pans of water on the stove in order to shiver in 3 inches of lukewarm green river water in a cast iron bath!
I have lost my sense of humour completely!
And the builder turns up but what is he DOING under the house while I shiver in my single bed in this building site with big gaps in the floor where the cold winter winds whistle through? Can’t he see that I don’t CARE about the bloody piers, I care about my own comfort and making a home that I can live, rather than camp in!
To add to my frustration I seem to have spent most of the week in the Telstra vortex – on hold ad nauseam while I battle valiantly to get some sort of broadband solution. Lots of promises from call centre land, but they’ve probably never been out of Mumbai, and certainly never experienced the strange and scary Orwellian world of telecommunications in regional Australia. I have become part of ‘the one percent’. John Howard always talks about broadband solutons for 99% of the Australian population. I’m the rest!
This week’s brave new frontier is wireless broadband. Sounds good the way they talk the talk, but when it comes to walking the walk it transpires that it isn’t Mac compatible. Back to the drawing board and the stove to keep boiling the water . . . .