Christmas 2007

I’ve realised that I usually only update this blog now when Wordpress wants an update, so that I’ll upgrade and then continue on a draft that I started about a month ago and then finally post it.  I’m also including pictures in this one after a few requests.  It’ll go some way to prove that at least some of my random musings really happened and perhaps it’ll go a bit of a way to drown out the boring writing.  OK probably not.

You could be confused into thinking it was in fact August September as I fall further into not keeping up to date, but anyway, cast ye minds back to December 2007 and I shall continue. -cue wavy flashback-

After spending the first few months at my new job and living with my dad, both of which were a new experience for me I was trying to find a flat in London.  I went to a few viewings, some of them which were worryingly small, one notable example was where the bedroom, lounge and kitchen in one room, the sofa being the bed.  The thought occurred to me that it may not be so nice to go to bed and still being able to smell my lovely stir fry which I’d cooked right next to me a few hours earlier.

Upon settling on a flat in Forest Hill, I put a holding deposit on it, waiting to move in during December.  However, after being in an interim period where my tax threshold on my wages were worked out, Alistair Darling thought that I get too much money and that I should therefore give a vast quantity of my wages to him as opposed to keeping it.  Therefore with regret I had to concede that I could not budget very well on the wages that I would actually get and cancel the deposit on the flat.  After that, it became somewhat of a panic to find somewhere else rushing as my Dad informed me that I could not live in his when he whilst he was away on holiday.  I unfortunately did not get a good range of viewings; they were almost all in South East London and whilst I didn’t know the city at all, I did at least want to see flats in different areas.

Therefore I had to settle with one of the first places I saw due to time constraints.  It was a one bedroom flat in Peckham Rye in a semi detached house.  My flat was on the first floor, above a couple downstairs and needed…work.  You know, the usual, mould in the kitchen and cracked floorboards everywhere (which later resulted in unavoidable crumbs dropping between them which I assume was making the makers of the scuttling noise very fat) There was also a criminal way of operating the shower; having no mount, the shower head had to be held whilst holding the trigger to let the water out.  The bulb in the bathroom was so powerful it had melted itself to the bulb holder, rendering it irremovable, but had the side effect of giving off a lovely toxic plastic smell whilst on.  The fire exit was a joke too, being a sort of enlarged cat flap to a metallic platform on the outside.  No ladder, just a 15 foot drop down.  How could we forget the fantastic microwave, complete with large crack in the front which is a bit of a health hazard so I left that one be.

I moved in during the winter month of December, with some appreciated help from my father who helped in the essentials that this mind could not comprehend, such as setting up curtain rails, extending power cables long enough to reach computers.  Also the provision of a TV and suitable furniture was most welcome, especially as I did not have broadband (a concept that I had been familiar with the past 3 months at my dad’s house and a month at mum’s, although I made do with the company laptop avec 3g card).

The electricity, gas and water companies that the estate agent suggested on their were of course the most expensive, so the aforementioned 3g card was worth it when checking out price comparison sites for utility companies and getting the best deal.  However, my first night there was greeted by an argument of epic proportions.  The couple downstairs were not wasting any time screaming and I was torn between trying to get to sleep and ringing the police.  After considering that my idea of an argument that is bordering on murder may be different to others, I let it be.  I later realised that this was indeed a regular occurrence for them, regular and violent to the point that stuff was breaking and this was kicking off almost always without fail at ungodly hours.  I actually met up with them and they invited me in as they had a computer problem and as it turns out they were pretty nice people, nothing like the disembodied voices had suggested (the man in particular).  They had cheese, crackers and Wallace and Gromit on TV-a very appropriate foodstuff to be enjoying considering the entertainment.  

Other things I learned were that my landlord (who I hadn’t met as I went through an estate agent) was almost certainly a raving psychopath…and certainly a criminal and this guy had the keys to my door.  There was a certain story involving him, a hammer, and the couple’s broken door.  Other cheerful tales of this delightful landlord included the classic “Girl that used to live in my flat had a broken water pipe, refused to pay the rent until it was fixed. Landlord changed the lock, forcing the girl to sleep in her car for a few nights, after which her cat died of hunger. How he is still a landlord is beyond me, you can probably guess, I just wanted to give this guy a big hug…

Arguing wasn’t the neighbour’s favourite past time oh no.  They also loved to play music rather loudly with the bass turned right up.  Go on, guess what genre of music…I bet you’re wrong. Yep it was Disney Theme Tunes.  I could think of much worse music to be listening to at loud, or indeed any volume but that’s not the point.  The point is, it’s a bit strange as they didn’t have any children and I now know the lyrics to “Magic Carpet Ride”, “Circle of Life” and so on off by heart.  OK, so for some of them I probably did anyway.  There was also an instance when I was awoken at 2am by a knocking at the front door.  It turned out to be the woman downstairs who was locked outside of the main house and had been out there for hour, trying to get her boyfriend to let her in, who was obviously ignoring her.  As it was winter and she didn’t have a coat I thought this was pretty bad and so offered my humble flat, but she thought she’d try her luck with the inside door of her and her boyfriends flat, cue more arguing as she was let in.  I don’t know how I made it into work for 9am every day during December, but people clearly noticed that I was tired.   

On top of all the bad points of this place, a mere 2 days after I moved in, a Mr. Garside asked me if I was still looking for places and if I would want to look for a place together.  Doubting that the estate agents and especially the crazy hammer-wielding landlord  would appreciate me breaking a 12 month contract after 1 month, I agreed to meet up with the Geoffster in the new year to discuss a possible light at the end of the Peckham.  

Normally the way that my Christmases work are that I spend Christmas and Boxing Day at my mum’s and then travel to my dad’s to see him and repeat the process over again.  This time as I was so close to my dad’s, I thought I’d do it the other way round.  It did however have the rather lonely side effect of being on my own for the first time ever on Christmas Eve, spending it in my flat (or whatever other descriptive that can be inserted to replace ‘flat’).  Anyway as per usual the entertainment and food were of top quality on Christmas Day and I proceeded to wish that this food didn’t make you put on weight and slowly forgetting as the day went on.  I then returned, slightly fatter to my humble abode.  This pattern continued on Boxing Day and then after that, I left for Kettering to repeat it at my mum’s house.  

New Years Eve was a particular low point, which consisted of playing the most excellent Tomb Raider Anniversary, pausing it at 11:45 to watch the TV until after midnight, and then resuming play.  Even my dad in his nearby house was out celebrating with his wife and some of her family, but nonetheless I tend to think this day is an excuse to drink large quantities of alcohol, not that many people need that excuse.

OK so only 9 months behind present day, I can relax now.

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Christmas, New Year and Broadband Support

The yule-tide season finally reaches pinkwookie, so dust off your Christmas trees, grab a cracker and have some good old vintage 2006 mulled wine on me.

Christmas was a very normal and routine affair as it has been for me the past few years. This year was probably worse, as I was in that awful period after having graduated, having the time of my life at uni, to a life of unemployment, few local friends and possibly worst of all, no Internet.

I fully meant to do something other than stay in my room on New Years Eve this year, but my immune system decided to play a horrible joke on me and after having an early night, I woke up around midnight and was pretty ill. Bringing in 2007 by being sick wasn’t the best celebration and made me think of what the other 364 days had in store for me.

As a year, 2006 certainly had its moments, we graduated, Oblivion came out and ruined my life and we all learned the importance of Pentapeptides.

It took way till February until I could class myself in the enviable group of employed. I moved into Watford, started a job and festered for a while. Neither the area or the job was for me, despite being told I was quite good at the job. Basically what it entailed by broadband technical support was receiving a call from a disgruntled customer whose Internet wasn’t working and it was a race to either find out why they couldn’t get online and offer a solution, or providing a walkthrough to fix it over the phone. I mean, it wasn’t enough that we got normal customers with a normal problem, we only got the angry ones; when you ring up technical support for our company, you get through to a helpful person in India. When said customer exhausts all possibilities and gets thoroughly annoyed with said Indian, complains that they want to talk to somebody English, that’s when they get through to us. I did find it an amusing irony that a large portion of my colleagues were Asian, or Indian anyway, they spent the first 5 minutes of a phonecall describing the English weather and what time it was in England. To the credit of the general public, the vast proportion of calls that I took, broadband wasn’t working through no fault of their own, i.e. bad signal, not yet activated, the accounts department decided to mess up randomly and deactivate their account and broadband. From February till June I worked there and as you can guess I have some amusing war stories of customers which I’ll share.

I’ll protect the name of the company that I worked for, a few of you know it, but I can say they were Brazenly Terrible, Brilliantly Trashy and Broadband Trouble.

Well there were the usual hard of hearing, elderly, partially blind (and worst of all, a combination of all 3) and believe me getting them to put the cursor in the address bar was harder than finding the lost city of Atlantis, let alone typing in the address for our remote support tool so that I could do everything for them. You do wonder in circumstances like that, what the heck they’d do with the Internet if it was working…

There was also a guy, during my first week there, he was disabled, housebound and relied on the Internet as a lifeline to order food from the local supermarket. What you say to someone in that situation when he has no Internet is beyond me, and although whether his story is valid, when a person is telling you a story like this, you have no choice but to believe it.

There was the suicidal woman, who was crying over the phone as she had lost the Internet, and was saying things like “If you don’t ring back, I don’t know what I’ll do to myself…” Until the situation turned round, when I got her someone out to fix the problem and she was a completely different person, apologising for her behaviour, saying that I have a calming voice and asking if I’d ever thought about a career in teaching, as I’d be the perfect candidate for the children she taught.

Then there were the nice people, like an elderly gentleman from Scarborough, who I was reminiscing all the places there, him inviting me in for a Whisky, next time I’m in town. The uber-hot sounding welsh women, where I almost considered delaying offering the solution so I could stay on the phone. The hot sounding young female doctors and the praise I got back from some customers who rang us back, got through to someone else, but they just rang to say my name and say thank you. Although the constant threat was there that your call was silently being monitored by a superviser, I generally got through the day without sawing off any limbs, scored top associate the first month I worked there, and got high empathy scores when supervisors were listening to me. I know I’m blowing my own trumpet here, but haven’t we all at some point? Besides, anyone that I talked to during that dark era knew I was pretty unhappy and my heart wasn’t in it, and the old gall bladder thing was the last straw of being in a remote area where I knew little to noone in my spare time and doing a job that I wasn’t overjoyed doing. I did meet some cool people whilst working there and am sorry to have left them, but it’s been for the best.

In other news, recently my numb right thigh has finally beneffitted me, I accidentally bashed it on the corner of the table and it took me a few moment to think…’wow, that really should’ve hurt, oh well’

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