Day2Day

When I moved into this house I bought a new washing machine because I needed one that would be able to slide past the radiator and the shower into the plumbed space for it. This meant it had to be slimline and I ended up with a top loading Hoover model.

At the start of this year it got a bit random. When you select a programme some LEDs light up, the LEDs show what the programme will do - a rough idea of time, and the spin speed are indicated. These often bore no resemblence to the chosen programme. Over the last month or two it got quite silly and was a bit like a roulette game, trying to match your desires with what it would offer. As far as I can tell the lit up status was what it actually did.

Only then it totally broke down and filled, but didn't wash anything - the clothes were left sopping wet and soapy.

I went to the Hoover after sales service and found that for a pricey £115 they would repair the machine and replace any parts, and put the repair under a new warranty. It seemed like the fastest route to a functioning machine, and although not cheap, at least it would be someone who knew what they were doing. So I booked an callout.

At least, I assumed I did. I filled in a form online, choosing a day, described the problems, and got an email with a booking reference.

I made sure to not be away from home the day of the supposed appointment, which was in one of those vague "8am-6pm" slots. At half past two I called them to ensure they were coming, only to find they weren't.

When I fill in the form, at their end, there is an email generated. This gets printed out and then re-input into another system. Except it hadn't been. The people I spoke to suggest that it was never printed or it got lost. This was why I had no actual appointment. This was why I hadn't had a call telling me which two hours my appointment would be in. I was chided for not calling when I didn't hear anything from them within 48 hours. I pointed out that I HAD heard from them, I had a booking reference and thought I had an appointment.

They seemed uninterested, and just kept trying to upsell the service I had requested. Instead of paying a one-off fee, I could buy a new warranty for only £14 per month. I did the maths and said no. They kept trying to sell it, but went quiet when I said that a washing machine that breaks down twice within five years without heavy use is not fit for purpose and I would get my money back some other way.

Eventually they booked me an appointment for two days after the phantom appointment. The man attended and promptly declared the issue to be a broken belt, then left because he didn't have the part in stock, after telling kayleighraven that it was a very common problem but we'd just have to be patient and might need to wait until Monday for the part to become available. So not only do we get a duff appointment, but then the guy who turns up isn't capable of fixing one of the most common issues with the model of machine he knew he would be examining, with an explanation of the issue?

Haven't heard any more from them, since. Not convinced that the randomised programme behaviour has anything whatsoever to do with the broken belt. Hoover have received an "I'm unhappy" letter. And I've wasted nearly three hours and fifteen quid getting some clothes clean and dry at a laundrette today. Colour me unimpressed.

One of the things we do at work is to have small bursts of work known as "sprints". We plan what we'll cover at the start, work on it, then present it with a demo at the end, to all interested parties. On Friday they asked me to do the demonstation part of our presentation.

I went in with no preparation beyond writing down on a post it note the four things I wanted to show people. I stood up and talked to the room of somewhere around 50-60 people about it, and then we moved on. There were more presentations and demonstartions, the last of which was very innovative and flashy and interesting.

After the meeting eight different people came and told me separately how well they thought I'd done. I've been told I paced it well, I was engaging, I put things at the right level for the audience, and that I was a natural.

Now, I was comfortable with the material I was talking about, but I had no preparation time, and didn't feel particularly nervous. This morning two more people told me how well I'd done - and that's after they had a whole weekend for it to fall out of their heads completely.

I appear to have wowed an audience. I can only attribute this to being a side effect of learning to present material in an off-the-cuff way through larp. Give me a skeleton and I can give you back a ritual. Dump some plot on me and I can manufacture a rite. Tell me where we're going and I can pull a transportation rite out of nowhere. And give me the thing I've been working on for three weeks and I can tell you all about it and make it sound impressive.

As a colleague said on Friday - the trick is to work out how to make this skill work for me. Hmm.

I'm off to a cottage by a Welsh beach for a week. There will be no internet. What should I pack for entertainment?

So Greg is likely to share driving with me when we go to Wales soon. He is covered to drive my car 3rd party. My car, according to http://www.webuyanycar.com, is worth a grand total of fifty quid (the tyres cost me four times that! And it doubles in value when I put petrol in it!).

Given these facts, is it worth insuring Greg to drive my car fully comp? Not sure if this is a factor, but I have RAC roadside recovery.

So I have a really slow heart rate. It's always been slow, at least, as long as I've paid it any attention. When we learnt at school how to take a pulse my fellow students were puzzled. The people on my first aid course thought I must be amazingly chilled out because my heart went so slowly. When taking my blood pressure the doctor got concerned about how slow my pulse is and ordered a suite of tests to check nothing was wrong. It's supposed to be a sign of fitness, which is odd, because I'm really not particularly fit, but there's apparantly nothing wrong, I'm just weird that way.

When I say slow, I really do mean slow. An average resting heart rate is 70-100 beats per minute. Mine is in the forties - the slowest I've ever seen it was 43bpm, but it's usually around 48.

What I want to know, though, is what my maximum safe heart rate should be. It's generally calculated as something like 220 minus your age. But for an average 35 year old that's somewhere around 2.5 times their resting heart rate. For me that's more like four times my resting rate - so is that still a suitable figure to use if doing something intensive like running?

I want to play with the shiney new toys but Google haven't invited me to Google Plus - anyone got spare invites?

And at the same time, they changed what my calendar looks like and the contrast between the calender borders and the background isn't very good.

I am mildly miffed. Especially after I spent a chunk of yesterday showing a colleague how to do stuff in Gmail that he didn't realise it did.

Incidentally, I still read LJ every day, but it doesn't take nearly as long any more. I guess I should write more myself, but we've heard that refrain about a million times, haven't we?

Who runs smofs.org and how do I contact them? I keep getting monthly reminders that I'm on a mailing list that I don't think I am, and none of the "unsubscribe" etc links work.

Hot
- General buzz - people like my character lots.
- Cap'n's ritual results
- Rumours of Graf's death on two consecutive nights, and being entirely fine.
- Whack-a-Satuun and Twister Balance rites were hilarious - although the first de-power Satuun of the weekend was awesomely powerful in terms of atmosphere, too.
- Peace negotiations saving our bacon, but hairy moments despite it
- Running away from Satuun and sitting in camp with fingers in the air, Jay and K8's reaction was priceless. (Wide eyes and a subdued whisper of "motherfuckaaaa...." as they turned around immediately upon seeing us.) Subsequently being congratulated on actually having left a message saying where we'd gone.
- Stealth healing during the final battle.
- Monstering for a change at a mainline and getting to be part of the group that did the rites that empowered the Big Bad of the weekend (although I would have been better if I could speak at that point but my throat wasn't having it).
- Getting caught up in rites to Law after hearing the rather funny comment that "The Chaos worshippers are very organised".
- A chance opportunity to get to know Sue's new Incantor character.
- Shocking the healers: "We could use more sanctuary items" "Just use your paladins" "We don't have any."
- Trying to give away beer cake to the Bears who seemed wary that it might be poisoned and kept refusing.
- Inadvertently choosing a totally sheltered corner to camp in - standing in front of the Jackal's fire I was freezing, but when I came to my tent to sleep and took layers off, I warmed up!

Not
- Stupid, annoying illness. No voice for most of the event and a hacking cough developed, too, reducing my ability to sleep.
- Trying to get everything into the car - in both directions. Packing would take far less time if I had more space to play with.
- Weather. The crazy, crazy winds. My new bell tent has uber metal pegs and was placed well so survived, and my oc tents were sheltered, but the wind killed tents around us and just made it really cold at night, as well as throwing my cloak in people's faces. And, despite factor 50 sun screen and snaz all over my face, I've got mild sunburn.
- Vague guilt at not doing a ritual. I had IC reasons to not be there and I had no voice, but the circle was perfectly aligned to my character and with a couple of rituals under my belt I think I could have beaten the score we got by a lot (a sad and harsh 4). Still, it means the new guy has got one under his belt now and the feedback was useful.