It’s looking like a beautiful day, as the song goes. Got a few jobs on the list today. Two of them involve calling an insurance company and the Lincoln City Council, both of which are classically a ball ache.
I did try calling the council three weeks or so. The phone was answered quite quickly which both surprised and impressed me. Then I realised I’d been diverted to a receptionist who couldn’t help at all other than to forward me to the right department. Having been second in the queue for fifteen minutes I gave up and took their “music on hold” advice to email them. The autoresponder told me they would be in touch within two weeks. Three weeks later they haven’t bothered. I did try calling a few times last week but their number was “unobtainable”. Sigh.
It is only on occasions like this that I switch on my “landline”. This is really a PoE driven VoIP phone associated with our long time Lincoln geographical number. It stays unplugged most of the time as it would otherwise ring persistently with spam and scam calls.
I am early to the shed. The shed is currently a temporary home to two bikes as they would have got in the way of Darryl the plasterer who passes through the garage to access his van and the skip. He only has a day or so left to do so the bikes will soon be back where they belong and, quite importantly, the skip removed from our lives. We have made good use of the skip, having ordered a bigger one than Darryl needed knowing that we had a lot of crap to shift.
A few other items have found their way into the shed including an axe and a pair of boots. These may bide a wee while longer until I think I’ve done everything I want to do re the log pile.
Today, btw, in case you didn’t know it, is Friday. That’s good innit? It has no real significance per se other than the fact that I give myself two days off from the pool over the weekend. This is because their off peak hours change for Saturday and Sunday and I can’t really be bothered to go to find out whether they are busy or not. I like to avoid busy times. When I arrived yesterday I took a peek through the windows looking onto the pool from the caff area and it did look quite full. By the time I had changed there was only one person left in and she soon got out so I had it to myself. I did 45 mins front crawl and then hit the spa for ten minutes.
On my way home I dropped in at the Mercedes garage as I have been toying with getting a car. Although these cars are quite luxurious, and if I got one I’d be after comfort, it put me off to a certain extent. The big push as you might imagine is electric/hybrid. I’m not ready for electric. For one thing they have small boots and massive depreciation and they are v expensive. I was more interested in diesel but these are very much on the way out apaz. I drove off in THG’s entry level Peugeot 208 thinking that my current strategy of borrowing her car occasionally was still fine.
The whole subject of cars confuses me. I’m not really a car person. Years ago I went to a “VoIP Executive Retreat” in Sophia Antipolis on the Cote D’Azur. Arriving at Nice Airport I swung by the car hire desk to pick up a machine. I only needed a car to drive about 10 miles there and ten miles back. During the conference the car would sit in the hotel car park.
So the girl behind the desk said they had a few different makes in and that I could choose. She rattled off a few different models and I stared back blankly at her. Then, to try and help out, I sked what colours they had available. This confused her. Finally she came up with a proposition. They had a really great deal on an Audi A8 going on right then. I took it without really comprehending how much it was going to cost. Ordinarily I didn’t think an Audi A8 was the kind of car the company would hire for me but if it was then ok and I said yes. I should have been a bit suspicious when she asked for two different credit cars as a guarantee in case of any issues.
I drove off to my hotel ten miles away thinking to myself that I had better not use the phone that was built in to the dash. After returning the car I was somewhat stunned to note that the bill for three days and twenty miles was around £550. Remember this was more than twenty years ago. It was a lot of dosh for a hire car in those days.
Back in the office I called the travel agent and explained the sitch. There was no way I could put £550 for a hire car through my expenses. At the time we were going through a few years with layoffs every Christmas. Didn’t make sense to stick your head above the parapet.
The travel agent got Avis, or whoever they were, to refund my car, put it though their own account and laundered the transaction somehow.
There is a follow up story to that. Once a month I used to fly to Canada for meetings. On one occasion I got a deal on an upgrade to the hire car and drove away in a big posh Lincoln Town Car. It actually made sense as there were five of us and we could all get in the one car. The slight embarrassment came the next day when I rocked up at HQ in this very big posh car and parked in front of the entrance. As we were getting out of the car our MD got out of his hire car which was something like a Fiat Punto. I could have fitted it in the boot of the Lincoln. Ah well.
Gotta go. A few more logs to sort out 🙂