Dreams of Impending Father's Day

THE VERY DEFINITION OF "INSANITY"
Jennie says that I don't spend enough time on this blog talking about my children, so here's a little something to help rectify that oversight, and to help me talk my way out of the trauma of moving our youngest from his cot to a fully fledged bed.

My favourite definition of insanity is "Repetition of the same action despite assured failure." Last night that definition would have been a perfect representation of the chore of putting Oscar to bed. In fact, let's have a blow by blow repeat of the whole, "Putting Oscar to bed" saga. It goes something like this...

Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Drink a beer. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Drink another beer. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed. Put Oscar to Bed.

And so on. After a while it got to be quite the chore. Of course by the time that it became quite the chore it was 11:00 pm and it was time for the parents of the household to go to bed. In hindsight perhaps I should have given the beer to the two year old, or done something less painful to myself to help break the monotony of the evening - Like hit the recently injured big toe on my right foot with a hammer or something.

AND NOW, THE TRIUMPH OF GOOD OVER EVIL!
Tonight was a different story. It only took somewhere between 6 and 8 attempts to get that little shi ... Errr, little bundle of sunny faced joy ... to stay in his bed and go to sleep. All things being equal however it could be that he was extremely tired from the night before, and is therefore saving the Next Big Thing for tomorrow night. Ah, the joys of Monday! Just in case they weren't miserable enough, Boo can make them so much worse. In the words of Michael Garibaldi, "I'd rather have my gums extracted."

POSTSCRIPT TO LAST MONDAY
I have this nagging suspicion that, in my misadventure in zealous customer service, I may have broken a rib. I'll let you know how it turns out, and how much my colleagues and family laugh at me should my suspicions be confirmed...

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Now playing: Within Temptation - Forsaken
via FoxyTunes

Ouch time. Yet again.

NEW HORIZONS IN CUSTOMER SERVICE
Why it seems that I update my blog only in times of personal injury is probably a coincidence, but here we go again with another episode of the slap-stick comedy that is my life at the moment.

Thanks to the kind people who work at Asus (and their rather nifty looking Eee PC 1000H) I am able to type this entry from the confines of my pain-filled bed, rather than the chilly solitude of the study at the other end of the house. Thinking about it I feel that perhaps there would be little difference, other than missing out on the pleasant(?) company of Jennie at the moment who is next to me, comforting me in my time of need with much heart-warming laughter and merriment. Well, it would be heart-warming if it wasn't at my expense. Deep down I'm sure that she means well - Even if "means well" in this case probably translates as "deeply amused". Jennie has been a rock of support and sympathy to me, even if appearances can be misleading.

The latest incident happened at work yesterday at VU's St Albans campus when a student had finished paying a late amendment fee using her debit card. Seconds after leaving the student service centre I noticed that my most recent client had left her debit card behind. Like a rocket, a bullet even, I was up, out from behind the counter, across the foyer and out the door of building 4 and moving at speed. Look out! Here comes Customer Service Guy (or Clumsy, Suicidal Git - you decide). Across the courtyard I ran, determined to return the card to its rightful owner. I caught sight of her some distance away and, keeping an eye on my target, put on a burst of speed. In hindsight I should have kept two eyes on where I was going.

It was on the second last turn (left) that I came a cropper... I misjudged it, ran into a flowerbed and tripped on the sad remains of a once mighty shrub pruned down to a stump of sullen, vengeful fury filled with nothing but a burning rage against the species that cut it down in its prime. "Tripped" is such an inadequate word to describe the landing I made, and "splashed" doesn't quite work when you're talking about landing in tanbark. In any event I was a victim of momentum, gravity and hostile vegetation.

While we're at it, the phrase "The bigger they are the harder they fall" is misleading. Believe me, the bigger they are the more time they have to think about things on the way down... The list of things that went through my mind during this incident went something like this, "There she is! Shit! What the hell was that? I'm falling? Crap, I'm falling! Where am I going to land? Not good, not good. Can I turn? No. Shit. Arghshitfuckdamnthathurts!"

After impact I went about the sorry business of finding my glasses and removing about half a tree worth of tanbark from my clothing. I trudged my way back to the office, a picture of misery with that bloody debit card still in my hand. After cleaning the abrasions I did what I should have done in the first place, I punched her student number into my terminal to find her mobile phone number and left a message to let her know that her card was still in the student service centre.

This morning shortly before lunch I handed the card, still awaiting collection, in at the security office...

Busy busy busy....

Damn, getting slack again. Oh well, here goes ... One big post to catch up.

(MORE) CLUMSINESS
Those of you who know me best know that sooner or later I'm going to injure myself in some acutely embarrassing way. Last week was no exception, and was probably overdue anyway. It all starts with a cat. Which one? It doesn't matter. For one night last week I hated them all...

It all started with the wondrous odour of freshly laid cat piss in the study. One of our feline inhabitants decided that Graeme, far from having the piss taken out of him, needed to have some deposited on his air mattress that was lying around in the study as a matter of urgency. I decided that I'd better remove the large and ungainly cat toilet from the room, and shift it down the hallway to the garage where I could get to work on trying to clean the bloody thing. The smart thing to do would be to mop up the excess first.

I wasn't smart.

The first part of the trip, navigating the whole thing out of the study without spilling anything on the carpet, was a success. This should have been my first warning, but I wasn't paying attention. Little dribblets of cat piss dripped over the side of the air mattress as I moved it up the hallway. "No problem", I thought, "Hit it with some cleaning stuff and wipe it up with a paper towel (or two, or three) once I've got the rest of this in the garage and taken care of things there." My second unheeded warning was just how quickly I was able to clean up the mess in the garage as well as the trickling mess down the hallway. I used a lot of spray cleanser during the cleaning process and, being winter, things were a little slow in drying. Things like the tile floor running the length of the hallway for instance, that was slow in drying...

The almost inevitable dance that followed this bout of late night cleaning went as follows....

1. Stomp - Stomp your way up the hallway, muttering about cats, bladders and the bladders of cats in particular.
2. Slip - Slip your soft-rubber shoed foot (I was wearing crocs, an apparent injury hazard) on a wet patch of tile floor.
3. Split - Split your legs just as far as they'll go - All the better to lose what little balance you have with.
4. Swing - Swing your foot up, perch it gracefully in the air before you,
5. Stab - Stab your big toe into the floor just has hard as you can.
6. Scream - Scream as waves of pain crash their way from your toe, through your leg, up your spine and into your (soon to be) long suffering brain before you,
7. Swear - Swear and swear and swear and swear...

Guess which foot did the slipping, stabbling and eventual bruising? Remember this post? Same foot. In fact, here's a picture of last week's injury.
As you can see the big toe is looking all painful and nasty. Jennie, paragon of compassion and empathy that she is, on the night of the injury told me to shut up and stop bitching about it... See! I told you it was injured!

SURVIVING INCOMPETENCE
I am at a loss, I really am, to wonder how anyone would even begin to think that giving Telscrape control of a national fibre broadband network can be anything other than a truly craptacular idea. These chuckleheads have trouble enough as it is with the vagaries of copper wire without giving them even more scope to fuck things up with fibre-optic cable. In my opinion the only cable that these invertibrates should be associated with is the ones separating their lungs from access to a viable oxygen source. Kill them all, and replace them with sheep. Sure, the sheep are still stupid as all hell but at least they're useful when it comes to things like wool and socially acceptable foodstuffs.

Our phone service is out, again. Telstra is denying all involvement with anything remotely resembling a fault, again. I want to execute Soloman Trujillo with a chainsaw enema, again. On Saturday I made the mistake of reporting a fault with our telephone service and then getting my expectations up that something would actually be done for a change. I'll leave it to my email to Telstra's complaints department to continue this line of thought.

Re: Fault number [TOP SECRET STUFF!]

I am emailing this as you do not have the facility to lodge or follow up on fault reports via email, and I feel that lodging a formal complaint with your office is the only avenue available to me at present.

I reported a fault with our residential telephone line on 2 August 2008, and during the call I stated that a full isolation test had been performed and that despite not having any telephone equipment connected to our line at all still yielded a busy signal when I called my home number from my mobile phone. Plugging in completely different telephone equipment that is known to work properly also resulted in no success whatsoever.

During the course of this call to your 13 22 03 number I also stated that our telephone and/or ADSL service suffered whenever the weather was poor, and that if it rained then our telephone service, our ADSL service or both services at once would be interrupted shortly thereafter. In addition I noted that this situation had been an ongoing issue since the telephone line was installed back in February of this year.

Arrangements were made for a technician to visit our premises this week and I confirmed my mobile telephone number with the operator who took my call and was assured that any technician who would be making the visit would call me half an hour before arriving. I stated that I would be available to be on the premises if given 30 minutes notice and was assured, twice, that I would be called before the technician's arrival.

Sweet load of good that did. I arrived home this evening to find that "Mike" had called by our place at 12:20pm today. He was nice enough to leave behind a card saying, "I called to repair your telecommunications service, however you were unavailable". How strange it must be to employ a telephone service technician who seems to be incapable of calling a mobile telephone; or seems to be incapable to remembering that, as a courtesy at the very least, a telephone call prior to a service call is always appreciated.

The fact that your technician stated that the telecommunications service to our premises was working merely adds another level of insult to an already pathetic level of customer service. If I were to deliver a similarly shabby experience to my clients, I would be out of a job in no short order.

We have been without a telephone service since approximately 11:00am on 2 August 2008, and so far this situation shows no sign of becoming any better any time soon. I find it even more galling as my ADSL service is working just fine at the moment, and IT SHARES THE SAME BLOODY LINE!

I'm not asking for much, just the telephone service that my wife and I pay our monthly service fee for. Is that too much to ask?

I expect a swift resolution to my current issue or my next email will be to the Telecommunications Ombudsman, and I will include all the details of this email as well as any response (or lack thereof) that may result.

I can only assume that "Mike the Technician" was pressed for 12:30 drinks at the pub... Oh, for those of you who know what our telephone number is and need a laugh, do a directory for our telephone number search using Whitepages.com.au, and then click on the 'view map' link for our entry. The result is close enough I suppose, it still shows a location in the Melbourne metropolitan area...

For more laughs check out the Troll Doll's wikipedia entry to see the traces of clumsy and ham-fisted edits to make complete jerk seem plain and boring - It was a much larger, and far more critical, document than when I first checked it out in January this year. Then a slash and burn edit happened and all I have is memories...

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Now playing: Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb
via FoxyTunes