Good morning lovely people! How are you? Did you have a good weekend?
I had a rather unproductive weekend. On Friday night, Alex and I headed down to Louise and Nathans house (aka the Wife and the Lord) as they were having a dinner party for some of Lou’s ex colleagues. We got there early (as I had the day off – more on that in a bit) and helped with the cooking of a million types of chilli and salsa and other nom Tex-Mex type stuff. (Seriously, I could eat that sort of food for ever)
There was much talking, drinking and eating. I headed to bed about half 1 – rather ashamedly, I was the first to go to bed! (Although sometimes, doesn’t there need to be one person to go to bed before everyone else, otherwise people feel awkward about leaving. It was a public service!) Most people went to bed about 2am, and some stayed up till 4am with the Jager (oh dear oh dear).
I was up nice and early the next day, and lazed about in my PJ’s with the Wife watching crap TV like Gok’s Fashion Fix. WHY. Alex and I headed back to Bath about 3, and I ended up napping when we got back (need to stop doing that, it messes me up!)
Sunday was equally as lazy, I had a bad nights sleep on Saturday because my lovely back was playing up again (if you’re a regular reader of the blog, you’ll know how much I have problems with my back!) and ended up staying in the bath till like, 4pm. We headed into Alex’s office about 5, so he could collect some books (ready for his move this week, exciting!) and had an exotic and romantic meal of….Maccy D’s. (Honestly, the conversation was like Alex: “What do you fancy for dinner, we could go to Banglo, or the curry place down the road, or the Velo Lounge, its up to you” Me: “Um…can we go to MacDonalds?” I am a cheap date. Sometimes.) Sunday evening was spent supervising Alex unpacking a box or three of junk I had found in the spare room a few months ago, and then repacking it whilst getting rid of the crap.
I took last Friday off work, because of a few reasons.
- I wanted to get some things delivered – a mobile broadband dongle from O2 (which apparently couldn’t be delivered anywhere but my home address…ok…) and two parcels that were originally delivered a fortnight before, then a week before, but because Royal Mail are so lazy, they didn’t bother to knock on the front door, just stuck those “Sorry we missed you” cards through the doors.
- I wanted to go shopping for some work clothes
- I wanted to see some friends
- I wanted to get some blogging stuff done
Want to guess how much of that list actually got done? Not even part of number 1. All that happened on Friday is that I got my O2 dongle (they have a good PAYG deal at the moment, £10 for the dongle, then £2 per day if you need it. I’m unlikely to need it, but thought it would be nice to have a back up) Very frustrating, as you can imagine! I even cornered my postman and had a little complaint at him about the lack of deliveries, and he said that even though I had requested a second redelivery on Friday, everything was about a day late from that depot so I’d probably get the things on Saturday. I ended up only getting one of the parcels, which is VERY annoying, considering that the missing parcel is a large Liz Earle order of goodness!
Another part of my weekend that annoyed me was banks. I needed to give my housemate some money on Friday, and normally I’d just go to the cash point to get it. But, because I waited till half 2 for the postman on Friday (until I realised that I needed to be on the 3pm train to Bath!) I didn’t get a chance. “Oh well” I thought “I’ll just do a bank transfer on Sat morning”. That plan was foiled however by Natwest informing me I’d need a special card reader (why make this something you have to order, Natwest?) “Oh well” I thought “Thats annoying, but the housemates bank is open till 6pm in Bath. I’ll just pay the money in cash” So we headed to HSBC, where a woman who was blatently playing Solitaire instead of helping people informed me that their machine was broken – “we can take the money, but it won’t credit till Monday”. I asked about a few other possible ways to make the payment, but all I got in response was that the machine was broken. (On a side note, that is the most irritating thing ever. I *know* the machine is broken, you’ve said twice already.) She eventually came up with the solution that I could get my bank to make the transfer. Which is what I was going to do until I walked out of HSBC and found Natwest next door, closed. I almost cried. (We sorted it in the end, the boy transfered the money from his account and I gave him the cash). But the problems seem to have come from things designed to be more secure or more convienient!
So yes, a long weekend which was supposed to be relaxing and productive just turned into a massive waste of time. Le sigh.
BANKS. Aren’t they massive shits.
The main issue at the moment is that they can’t organise themselves with FPS (the replacement for BACS). So they are all still sending payments by BACS all the time which takes three days… “Oh, unless you’d like to pay £25 for a CHAPS transfer?”
Grr. My RBS account doesn’t even accept FPS so it always takes three days to credit anyway, farquers. And have you tried paying in a cheque recently?? ARGHOMFG!!! They used to clear in three days, because that’s how long it took to send them to the other bank through the post. Now they’re processed electronically but take SEVEN days.
Let’s start a new bank where everything happens immediately.
.-= Tim C´s last blog ..Socialism?? =-.