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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