A Comedy of Errors

I was up early then noticed something strange sitting on one of our posts yesterday. My eyes were still sleepy so even the binoculars didn't work well. So I grab my garden clogs to go investigate while still in my pyjamas because no one in their sane mind is up at 5 am except me. Wrong! Now my neighbours know I wear Harry Potter pjs! The mystery item turned out to be a large stack of golf scored cards my husband had sorted while on the dock when the house was being shown the night before. He does the scores for the men's league. Why they were left out there is beyond me but it rained, no actually stormed heavily so all the cards were soaked. So the countertops were covered with drying score cards all day aka no cooking for the day.

I had the great pleasure of getting personal with Bell Sympatico yesterday. Despite the other problems I've had like not being able to access usenet through a newsreader, the only thing that bothered me was for some reason sending email halted. Or so it seemed. I was trying to send a video of the grandbaby to the kids and kept getting error messages. So I call their nice friendly tech support machine that makes me jump through all the hoops by pressing the right buttons. Finally I got a humanoid on the phone. Apparently English was a second language as I could barely understand her. She kept referring to Outlook even though I explained I was using Mail on Mac OS X. She told me to delete all email accounts which wasn't possible because I have two ISPs. Ok then she said to delete the Sympatico account and re-enter all the information. Then she told me to send a test message to see if it would go through. It did so problem solved. Messages were downloading just fine as well. I hung up the phone and tried to send the video message again. Up popped the error message! So I called the friendly tech support machine again, jumped through all the hoops and got another humanoid to whom I related the first problem and what was done. He spoke very broken English and was difficult to understand but somehow walked me through what he thought was the problem. Apparently Macs are foreign computers to Sympatico as the instructions were for Windows. So the preferences were deleted and reinstalled. A test message was successfully sent so problem solved. I hung up then muttered a few not nice words, settled back and tried sending the video message again. Up popped the error message! By now I was not a very happy camper so called up the friendly tech support machine again, jumped through the hoops and got a humanoid. I calmly told him what was happening and what I had done. He asked if I was trying to send an attachment so I told him yes. He asked how big. I told him the file was 32 MB to which he replied that Sympatico only allows attachments upto 20 MB then proceeded to try and sell me other services. Well there you go, almost 2 hours on the phone and finally a reasonable explanation for what was happening and why that particular message wouldn't go though. Why could they not have told me that in the first place? Kudos to Sympatico who will be losing my business as soon as the one year period is up in September.

Ok so that should have been enough for one day, right? Nope! The bluejays came back for a second helping of peanuts. I grabbed the container by the lid which I had neglected to vacuum seal. The peanuts went everywhere covering the kitchen floor. One bluejay was pecking at the window and here I was sitting on the floor just laughing. Hey, it was better than crying!

My husband arrived home with Chinese take-out and six packages of the chicken breasts that were on sale. I had forgotten I asked him to pick up more for another bulk cooking session. I took one look at the chicken, stuffed it in the fridge because the day was jinxed enough. Then he told me about the nice phone call to the guy responsible for getting our boat ready for the spring. You know the guy we pay a lot of money to? Apparently he is having a tiff with the owners of the marina where we keep our boat so people like us are getting caught in between. He didn't do the spring set-up because of those problem which led to us almost being stranded and we did need a tow even though we didn't have to pay for it. Getting a boat towed is costly. Our last tow bill was $700! This guy is holding almost 600 boats hostage just because he is having a tiff with the marina owner. So where is the humour? I started laughing when my husband was telling what was going oh. He asked what was so funny. At least this guy speaks English, I replied.

BTW, the boat problem sounds like a dirty carburetor. Another boater told us what to do and we'll get it checked out from there. My husband has decided this guy won't be touching our boat again and I agree.