I don’t often swear but tonight . . . the air was blue. This week at work has been horrid, the third in a row and I’m fed up with being treated badly.
Last night I was supposed to be going out with friends, my turn to drive. I set off in heavy rain, to pick up friend number one about three miles away, but pretty soon turned back because I was aquaplaning, and the fifteen mile drive to friend number two would have involved three miles of winding, potholed, single track lane with high hedges, ditches on the sides and pitch darkness. Result, beans on toast and an early night instead of a nice pub dinner and a good belly laugh.
So today I arrive home from work with the beginnings of a bug that’s going around the office – people bring their germs to work these days to share, because if you go sick you have to face a ‘return to work interview’. If you are sick too often you get monitored and then sent to occupational health. Luckily, in the three plus years I’ve been there I’ve only clocked up two sick days.
I thought I’d sit with a cup of tea; check my email and WordPress reader to shake off the stress.
Of course the broadband didn’t work! I checked the connections, nothing happened. I reset the router, nothing happened. I turned it all off and back on again, nothing happened. I thought perhaps the same bad weather that stopped play last night may be causing the problem so l left it, cooked dinner, watched some TV and then tried again. And again, then I started swearing.
Eventually I called the broadband provider, was in a queue for twenty five minutes, and then I got cut off. I dialled again and after eighteen minutes I finally spoke to a girly that had me jumping through hoops, giving her an endless stream of passwords, mother’s maiden name and the date of birth of the cocker spaniel that belonged to my second cousin when she was five.
Next I had to unplug, re-plug, unscrew parts of sockets and rummage through drawers to find spare white plastic thingy’s that came with the original package four years ago. None of it worked and she told me she would have to get an engineer to call back and asked what time on Saturday would be best. Saturday, that’s not tomorrow, I squealed, how on earth could I manage until then? I could tell that she felt sorry for me but there was nothing she could do so I said goodbye with the thought that perhaps the time had come to check out some other providers.
While watching TV I had the company of a certain Border Terrorist, Dido, curled up beside me demanding that I gave her a tummy rub and giving me a look of disgust every time I paused for a second. This same fur baby has a wicker toy box below the shelf with the router. She gets frustrated when she can’t find her favourite toy of the day and chews on whatever she can find instead.

Have you guessed yet?
It’s laugh or cry time!