Great, Now I Need A Crappy Nickname For This Car

The continued adventures of Epic Win and Epic FAIL.

Sunday: church, nativity play, garden centre, back on the road.

[In this case today’s Epic Win came in the form of the loud children in the nativity play who hadn’t learned all the words, but were sweetly comedic and Cartmel Sticky Toffee Pudding].

I’d been driving about an hour when the temperature gauge on my car decided that it was too hot to measure so shot off the top of the scale.  As the driver I found this odd, the heater hasn’t been working for the past week or so I was swaddled up layers upon layers and behind the wheel.

The accelerator then decided that it was a bit quiet so livened up the gentle December afternoon with a spot of crunching.  This wasn’t good so I pulled off the motorway into a town I faintly recognised.  As I pulled up to a roundabout the battery decided it had had enough and packed in.  Gentle coaxing and polite begging got enough life back into it to get me into a supermarket car park when I proceeded to have the AA eat the battery in my phone.

After about thirty-five minutes on hold I talked to an exceedingly bored guy who told me someone would be around at some point.  Half an hour later [90 minutes or so since I broke down] AA man #1 turned up.  Yay!  He thought it was a simple problem of the radiator being empty.  Nu uh, I had checked and fill that.  It was empty though, but that wasn’t the problem.  The head gasket had totalled itself [I shouldn’t be surprised, that’s one of the many illnesses which befell this car’s predecessor: The Temperamental Sewing Machine].

AA Man #1 wasn’t going to tow me to the garage, he’d get someone else to do it, but as it was dark and cold, and I was a lone female driver, he wasn’t going to leave me on my own.  Aww isn’t that nice?  Actually what he meant was he was taking me to the service station ten miles down the motorway to wait two hours for the pickup truck to come.

I rocked up at the service station with two hours to spare and no phone battery.  Not one of their six payphones worked so I meandered over the Travelodge and played my best I’m-an-abandoned-damsel-in-distress card to use their phone.  It worked and I left a handful of messages across Scotland before going back to get me some comfort food and a comfy seat to read a comic [fish + chips + mushy peas + Batman: Year One.  In any other situation it would’ve been bliss].

Then I sat in the cold.  Then I sat in the cold.  The pick-up driver phoned and said he’d be a little late.  Then I sat in the cold.  Then I sat in the cold.  I played on the Balance-Blocks-To-Win-An-iPod-Shuffle Arcade Game, I didn’t win. Then I sat in the cold.  Then I sat in the cold. I found a socket and charged my phone a little. Then I sat in the cold.  Then I sat in the cold. Then I sat in the cold.  Then I sat in the cold. A ridiculously condescending woman from the AA phoned and suggested that if I was cold or felt unsafe at any time I should go back to my car.  I point out my car was a ten mile walk through the snow and that her company had moved me here as it was a safe location.  She was speechless and condescended at me a bit more. Then I sat in the cold.  Then I sat in the cold.  Then AA Man #2 showed up.  Yay!

The pick-up driver was three hours late, which was fairly annoying given I was given an initial two hour wait.   Still AA Man #2 was ridiculously friendly and chatty, showed me photos of his kids and was what you would call a good guy.  Half an hour from home, however, his tachograph started beeping incessantly: he legally had to have a 45 minute break.  Deep deep joy.

I understand that drivers need to legally stop and rest for safety’s sake, but I cannot help but think that there should be some sort of leeway.  We only had another half hour to go, which we could have done and he could have taken his break there.  The reason he had been three hours late was because he was in stationary traffic.  He wasn’t driving.  He told me he wasn’t moving; no one was moving.  He had got out of his van, had a walk around, gone to the petrol station and bought some crisps and a newspaper, but his tachograph was still running.  It gets complicated when the law gets involved.  I know and respect the fact that he doesn’t want to break the law, that it’s not worth breaking the law for a towing job; but if the law wasn’t so black-and-white and instead relied on common sense wouldn’t it make more sense for everyone involved?

I got home at some time this morning.  The silver lining: I used yesterday as the ideal excuse to miss today’s office party which I really didn’t want to go to.

Flat Hunting

This past weekend can only be described in internet parlance as equal parts Epic Win and Epic FAIL.

Saturday saw me get up at some ungodly hour and drive to Glasgow in time to go flat hunting.  I made really good time considering the weather and the fact that it was the Saturday before Christmas.  I had expected – given I was driving through Glasgow City Centre – to have used a truck-stop worth of cusses before 10am; I was wrong.  At half past nine on the Saturday morning before Christmas Glasgow City Centre was eerily deserted, it was like a scene from 28 Days Later, ne’er a soul to be seen.  Which did was pretty handy for me.

The flat viewing then commenced.  First up was a two room place where the living arrangements were living room/kitchen – so far so normal – and bedroom/dining room.  Weird.  I think the problems were that the rooms were too big and just badly used.

The viewing for flat two was cancelled because the estate agent was snowed it.  Given I managed to get to Glasgow I was not impressed with her excuse.

Next up was a horrible flat, with saggy aged furniture, in desperate need of a lick of paint and holes up the side of the windows where daylight shone through.  In short.  I was not living there.

Flat four was even worse.  The estate agent wouldn’t even come in with us to show us around as the smell was too bad.  It was hideous.  I didn’t even look in all the rooms.  I couldn’t stand the smell.

Flat five, was so bad that the estate agents hadn’t been in for three years and could even gain access to the building.  I didn’t even want to see the street it was in.

Flat six was much better although The Boyf did not want me living in the neighbourhood.  It was without a doubt the best looking flat we’d seen so far.

Flat seven – the last one of the day – didn’t have an estate agent: it had a bloke with no surname.  The flat was the best we’d seen, it was really nice actually.  The décor could only be described as eclectic: one purple room, one green room and a wall of maps:  I liked it.  It’s in an area The Boyf is happy for me to live in, and I was ready to sign on the dotted line.  One incy-wincy problem: the bloke with no surname isn’t a registered landlord, he’s never rented the flat to anyone he hasn’t already known [the previous tenant was his mate’s sister].  I’ve decided that if he agrees to become a registered landlord [a process I’ve offered to pay for] I’ll take it because I really want the flat, I just don’t want to get screwed over.

Then we went to The Boyf’s little sister’s new flat which is hu-uu-ge and impressive.  I’m not really jealous though, because it’s not the kind of flat I would want to live in, it’s a bit…generic.  The bloke with no surname’s flat it more me, it’s a little more eclectic.

The day in short: reputable landlords = rubbish flats; independent landlord = awsum flat.

An Unbroken Arm, A Sexual Predator In Training, FAIL! And Re-Tweeting

I had quite a good day today, well, by quite a good day I do mean a number of things happened which I can retell as amusing anecdotes.

It all started this morning, or last night depending on how you look at it, just after closing time: The Flatmate and his Violent Sidekick returned to the flat in their three favourite states: drunk, loud and fighting.  The fighting, as ever, progressed from name-calling into physical violence and Violent Sidekick either fell or was pushed off the bed.  This, of course, led him to decide that his arm was broken and that he needed an ambulance.  [When envisaging this tale in your head be sure to remember and add in as many swear words and homophobic slurs as you can think of – and say everything a minimum of three times in order to get the full effect].  Violent Sidekick was determined that The Flatmate should be the one to call an ambulance, despite the fact that Violent Sidekick had a phone of his own.  No ambulance was called.

Three hours or so later and it’s getting up time for people with 9-to-5 jobs, so Violent Sidekick got up complete with two fully functioning arms.  It’s one of the lesser known side effects of being a Drama Queen: potation-related hypercalcimia where the bones knit back together at an astonishingly fast rate, but it does leave you feeling headachey and vomity all day in a manner not dissimilar to that of a hangover.

The fun was still coming by lunchtime.  As I walked passed a random clothes shop that I would never wear anything from a pair of girls in the window had stripped down four mannequins and were setting about dressing-up the headless figurines in the new season’s must-haves.  Standing outside the window was an eleven or twelve year old boy – eyes agog and mouth agape – on his mobile phone: “Get down here quick there’s [sic] plastic boobs”.

After lunch, there was very little work to be done in the office so we were amusing ourselves between phone calls from people who should really know better.  One particular phone call got my colleague Alien particularly irate [the whyfor isn’t important but, trust me, it was justified] so I printed her a little picture for her noticeboard to remind her of the occasion and to provide a calming influence should any similar situation arise in the future

In order to affix the above print-out to her noticeboard I needed to climb onto the desk and being the clumsiest girl in the known universe [and that is not hyperbolic] I slipped, just a little bit but by all accounts it turned into a slo-mo fall and the people watching were more freaked out than I was.  It made enough noise to cause the people three offices away to come rushing though – cake still in hand – to watch the aftermath.  I was completely fine and laughing it up with one colleague while the other –Alien – looked like she was going to go into shock.  She kept asking me if I was sure I hadn’t got a drawer sticking into my leg [you see, I fell onto an open drawer which she thought I must’ve impaled myself on].  Re-telling the story it isn’t quite as funny, I could have been seriously injured – but if I was then it was decided I would’ve sued on health and safety grounds through the most patronising of all the ambulance-chaser ads on the telly for there was no signage indicating that staff should not climb onto desks to affix sweary posters to noticeboards.

Finally I had my biggest ever day on twitter, and being the geek that I am, was giddy with giddiousness about it. Amanda Palmer re-tweeted me and then loads of people re-tweeted her re-tweeting me.  It was only a link to, what I believe to be, one of the top ten websites out there: http://www.davidbowieisverydisappointedinyou.com and it was only three minutes or so of twitter-mention-a-rama but it was awsum, becoz I iz a geek.

All in all, ‘twas a good day.

If I’m not back tomorrow then I won’t be back until next week.  I’m off on Sunday to spend a week in a variety of Scottish cities catching up with The Boyf, seeing shows, seeing my parents and starting to move-out.