Category: Life and Associated Annoyances

Goodbye Telstra

On Friday my landline died. I called Telstra and was informed that the problem was at their end, and it would be fixed by Wednesday the 6th at the latest, free of charge.

Yesterday (the 6th), on getting home I found that my landline was still not fixed. I called Telstra to ask what was going on but the wait to speak to someone was estimated at 15 minutes, so I hung up and decided to call this morning at work.

I arrived at work and, literally as I picked up my mobile to call them I got an SMS informing me that ‘unfortunately’ the fix to my phone line has been rescheduled to Wednesday the 13th.

I am not going to rant. I am not going to rave. I am going to call Telstra up and calmly register my displeasure. Then, once my phone line is up and running again, I will be taking my business elsewhere. I will also be looking into what is required to register a complaint with the Telecommunications Ombudsman.

That is all.

No TV and No Beer make Homer Something Something…

Got home on Friday night to discover that my landline was dead as the proverbial doornail. No internet all long weekend. Frankly it’s amazing I’m still alive.

Apparently Telstra are going to fix it either today or tomorrow. So they say at least. I ain’t exactly sanguine.

I did get some… stuff done though. Pictures will be posted when my home connection us back up and running, and my brain has recovered from going cold turkey.

Currently Making my Life Hell…

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a mechanic. Not the world’s greatest mechanic by any means, but a decent mechanic who earns a decent wage fixing and tuning cars and trucks.

One day you get a call from someone wanting you to come out and tune up their car. So you hop in your van and drive out to their address. On arrival however you discover that it’s not a car.

It’s this….

Helicarrier
Image from comicvine.com

Before you have time to react, the Captain whacks a hat on your head, says “Welcome aboard! You’re our new Head Engineer!” and drags you down to the engine room.

Which looks like this…

Engine Room
Image by Bodvar Eggertsson

Mistaking your look of horror for one of mere concern, the captain says “Don’t worry, the manuals are right here…”

Manuals
Image by _sgj_

You pick up one of the decaying books at random and open it. Every single page looks like this…

Instructions
Image by Damian Cugley

The Captain continues “All set? Your tools are over there…”

Tools
Image by Benchilada

“…and we think the forward port engine is about to fall off. Have fun!”

Through strenuous effort (and a lot of desperate banging on random pipes) you manage to keep the ship in the air. You even manage to accommodate some of the crew’s requests, such as restoring the air conditioning and halting the gradual detachment of the starboard mess hall. Buoyed by your apparent competence the crew send in a flood of new requests for things such as hot tubs and mood lighting, some of which you can manage and many of which you have to ignore.

Making matters worse, through all of this the Captain insists on a weekly meeting at Airship HQ in Zurich. Once a week you have to fly to Zurich and sit in a small room staring at a list of requests and upgrades. After about an hour the meeting is declared a success and you fly back to the airship to continue banging on pipes.

You find yourself entertaining thoughts of sabotaging the engines, or at least ignoring the more desperate maintenance tasks so the ship will fall out of the sky and (as long as you survive) you won’t have to deal with it any more. But your professionalism wins through, you take a deep breath and get on with tightening a valve that you think will correct the water pressure on deck three. Maybe.

Dachshund Antibiotics II

About this time last year, while recovering from a badly failed holiday and probable scrub typhus, I made a post titled ‘Dachshund Antibiotics’. This was a somewhat lame pun based on the fact that I had been put on doxycycline for the typhus, and ‘doxie’ is American slang for dachshund. “Doxie-cycline” therefore equals “dachshund-antibiotics”. See?

(I said it was somewhat lame…)

In any case, my blog is apparently now quite popular among people looking for antibiotics to give to their wiener dogs – I get several of them a week in my referrer stats. Not an anticipated consequence of my pun, but an interesting one.

Anyway the reason I bring all this up is that I’m back on the doxies as a result of a case of bronchitis which has resisted two rounds of amoxicillin, even when supplemented with super-duper clavulanic acid (guaranteed to kill the trickiest of amoxicillin resistant bacteria!). I feel like hell, am coughing like an infant at a homeopathic vaccination clinic and am only at work today because we’re in the middle of a heatwave and the office has better aircon that my apartment.

Hopefully the doxycycline will cut in before my skin combusts.

Bronchial Adventures

Well, this is fun. I’ve had a dry, itchy cough since before Christmas. This week it decided it would be better accommodated by my lungs, moved downwards and turned into bronchitis. On the plus side I’ve got a few days off work. On the downside my body seems to have decided that the best method to get rid of the infection is to get rid of my lungs entirely, and is attempting to cough them up on a regular basis.

I’ve been to the docs (happily I had booked an appointment to get the dry, itchy cough looked at before it went feral on me) and have been prescribed rest and a five day series of antibiotic pills the size of twenty-sided dice, so I should come up smiling on Tuesday morning.

In the meantime I’ve been working on painting my Cyclops Demolition Vehicle and watching a rather good documentary on H.P.Lovecraft up on ABC iView, so all’s well that ends well (assuming I do end up well – if not, I’ve got a repeat script on the giant pills).

Oh yeah, this is new. I bought a copy of the Game of Thrones board game. Hopefully I can introduce the guys to it soon, so Fabian can wipe the floor with us all. I’ve got a half a mind to try playing as the Starks, as it looks like an interesting challenge… I’ve also read my way through the first three books, and am now onto part II of Storm of Swords. I found Part I hard going at a few points, but it picked up at the end and I can’t wait to see just how awful the Martells turn out to be (just about everyone in Westeros is awful, it’s merely a matter of degree ;))

That’s it for now. Got some coughing to do…

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