Thursday 23 May 2013

The old man is snoring..

Yes, it is raining, it is pouring. Such downpours we have had!

Last night I drove home from choir. It was raining. I pressed the remote control, to open the garage, and nothing happened. Several times in a row nothing happened. and then I noticed that everything was rather dark. I parked the car and let myself in through the front door, and then discovered, albeit belatedly, that the power was off. Having coincidentally gone to choir with a torch in my handbag, I was able to check the fuse box, find the candles and the matches and throw a little light on the interior. If not the subject. No TV, no lights, no remote control, no kettle, the refrigerator and freezer off.

Oh bother! Or words to that effect.

I prowled around checking it all out. Then after half an hour the power came back on. But not the street light outside my house, and not the internet or the TV.   Surrendering to the inevitable, I went to bed. In the morning the internet was still off, as was the TV. Thus I had to ring the various utilities and organise them to check it all out.

This meant I could not get to my One to One session at the Apple store this afternoon. You cannot ring Apple to cancel and I could not, of course, email, so after this morning's class I had to walk there and cancel, and then hurry home to await the utilities people. They came, in due course, promised to fix the street light, noted the trees further along the street, which need pruning, and told me I had to contact the internet and TV people. They deal with power, not with cables.

The TV and the internet came back on, but the rain keeps falling in a very drenching manner.

It is horrid telephoning the utilities, You go through hoops identifying yourself, and then they tell you there have been outages in the area and all will be fixed in the fullness of time. Or to ring some one else.

When did the word 'outage' spring forth?

Thus I fill my day. It is disappointing that my first effort in some months to overcome the thick mental cloud of confusion about all things technical has been thus thwarted.

Since changing my Internet Service provider there have been many complexities to deal with. And they all take so much time. And make me recollect my youth, when you seldom made long phone calls, had no TV or internet to fill the days, and instead went to work, school, tennis or swimming, or read.

But I did get to choir last night, and my voice is coming back, although it needs to be treated gently. All these technical people cope with the minutiae of telephones and computers, outages and intages, on and off switches, plugs, remote controls and the like. Such as speaking to distraught and confused customers, who cannot always understand their offshore foreign accents.

But can they sing Rachmaninov?

To each his or her own. But I'd like to be better at multi-tasking.

3 comments:

Elephant's Child said...

Frustration and aggravation. And I would love to be a little more technologically literate AND to be able to sing. Rachmaninov is out of my league, but then so is a recognisable 'three blind mice'.
I am glad that your voice is (slowly) coming back and you can get back to choir and to your Italian classes. Goodness you are busy.

Pam said...

Oh, technical stuff. Argh. Sympathy.

Friko said...

What I find hardest in such situations is being older. Such small problems are so huge now, they never were when I was young, they were things to take in my stride, or at least similar things were. But now anything that goes wrong becomes a mountain to climb. is such an effort to cope.

I just read your previous post. It doesn’t do to look back over the past and regret what we did. We did what we could. All of us.

I have long forgiven myself for the stupid mistakes I made.