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Lots to get on with but got bogged down with life today. I really don't understand how you people with proper jobs where you have to be somewhere for a certain time ever get any of your domestic stuff done. Even with my cushy freelance life I find it very hard. Our new dishwasher had broken down (it's been beeping and warning about something for months, but finally gave up the ghost yesterday) and or satellite TV stopped working weeks ago. I rang up about both and though these should have been simple matters of arranging a visit from an engineer, they ate up time. The man from Sky said he'd ring me back to arrange the visit, but he never did, so that's another job for tomorrow. The sooner the robots have taken over and can organise all this stuff for us automatically the better, as far as I am concerned.
My wife and I have also both reached the end of our mobile phone contracts and so we did some ringing around to see if we could get any deals on new phones. We're on different networks but thought we might be offered a preferential rate if we got on to the same one. But the mobile phone companies didn't seem interested, so I just sorted out my own phone first. Which took a lot longer than it needed to I felt, especially when the man on the other end of the line started to give me the hard sell on insurance. I explained that I had mobile phone cover already as part of my bank account, but he had plenty to say about why that wouldn't be sufficient and that I should pay him an extra £10 a month for something that I already had. Or £240 over the life of the two year contract. I told him that as the bank insurance was part of a package it wasn't something I could save myself any money by stopping and in any case I wasn't sure that paying the cost of well over a third of a new phone was the best form of insurance. Given that I've only had one phone stolen in my 20 years of phone ownership, that didn't seem worth it. Even if my bank charged me an excess, it was unlikely to be that much. It was pretty clear I didn't need insurance and the day was dripping away. He still persisted and I had to tell him firmly that if he didn't stop trying to sell me insurance that I definitely didn't need I would hang up the phone and take my account elsewhere.
This slowed him down a bit, but he still wasted a good deal of time apologising for wasting my time and then later mentioning as he summed up that I had chosen not to go for the insurance in spite of all the benefits it gave me. Maybe I should have hung up on him at that point to teach him a lesson. He thought he was getting one over me by chastising me for not going for this offer that the phone company were generously giving me at no obvious advantage to themselves, apart front he extra free money.
As we were heading to the supermarket we decided to upgrade my wife's phone at the phone shop. Although the man there was very nice and didn't give us the hard sell on insurance it still took us well over an hour to get through the process. I still hadn't packed for my week away on tour and had to drive to Manchester so that I could be up early to of a chat about podcasting at the Radio Academy. There was no chance of getting any work done.
And yes I am aware that having a broken dishwasher, a broken satellite TV and upgrading our phones are very much First World Problems, but I live in the first world and that's why it's such an issue.
I am not complaining about my cushy life of slightly tarnished luxury I am genuinely confused as to anyone with a job or the responsibilities of a family manage to do these things and battle through the barricades of bureaucracy that have to be dismantled to get the simplest things done.
I didn't even have time to address my cat's diarrhoea. Hopefully that will just go away by itself.
Thank goodness I have no proper responsibilities, right? That would make life impossible.
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