Some very strange things have been happening to me lately. So much so that my loving partner has started calling me "Princess of Disaster", or "POD" for short. Thanks darling.
Work disasters
I have had several diary entry errors which have led to me being in the wrong place at the wrong time on quite a few occasions. I have wasted a lot of petrol and upset at least one surgeon in the process. Positively the worst error though was getting out of bed extra early to get to a 7.30a.m. meeting, only to discover the meeting was indeed the following week. Wondered why it was so quiet in the room. Total loss was calculated as £1500 in business earnings, sixty quid in petrol and at least six hours of free time.
Domestic disasters
My house has tried to eat me and electrocute me in the last two months.
The eating incident: before Christmas I was two-thirds of the way up the loft ladder when it slipped a little on the carpet. Being a hinged ladder, this resulted in trapping my the ends of my fingers of one hand between the ladder and hatch. This was neatly pressed upon by my own 62kg of body weight, possibly more, considering I had just returned from a five-day trip to New York. This was pretty painful and as I watched the fingertips turn from pink to purple to white, I wondered how best to redeem the situation. I considered the options.
1. Jump off ladder
2. Scream for help
3. Climb into loft and try to release fingers once weight off ladder.
Option 1 was tempting but on reflection I figured I would either dislocate, break or deglove my fingers of skin, most likely all three at once. This would be painful, disfiguring, expensive in terms of loss of earnings and worst of all, embarrassing in the extreme when presenting to the Accident and Emergency Department of one's own hospital. Option 2 was barely viable, as most of neighbours are deaf and I have recently fallen out with one of them scuppering planning permission. I was hardly likely to give them the satisfaction of helping me out of a crisis. So I opted for 3. Fortunately I was agile enough to climb into loft in a contorted, yet controlled fashion, take my weight off the ladder and release fingers. It did hurt a lot though and by this time the fingers had gone blue.
The electrocution incident. A live wire from an old shed had got wet and shorted out the entire house of electrics. Not knowing the reason behind the repeated blackouts I merrily flicked switches, completely unaware that I was dealing with raw voltage which could have electrocuted me or burned the house down.
Total loss of domestic disasters over £100 (£79 paid in call out fees to incompetent electrician who failed to resolve the problem in two hours and £25 to competent electrician who sorted it in forty minutes). The fingers are mercifully intact, I have not been electrocuted and house was not singed in the slightest.
Oh, also the dishwasher also packed up which cost approximately twenty extra hours in washing-up time over two months and a fifty quid repair fee.
IT disasters
My laptop's motherboard gave up the ghost leaving me without my data for a month. The whole month because all the flooding in Thailand meant it was difficult for the laptop fixers to obtain a hard drive onto which they could put all my data. Even data retrieval left me short of a few airline e-tickets which were attached to emails, now since lost to the ether. Total loss: over £1000 in data retrieval and laptop replacement, almost £1000 nearly lost in business earnings due to lost invoices. And no I didn't buy a MAC but yes I now have an external hard drive to back up my "stuff".
All in all an expensive and stressful few months. The stress was acutely exacerbated one day mid January when my accountant over calculated my tax bill by £8k. I spent two hours wondering how much I could get for a kidney before he emailed me back to tell me it was his error. The angst was exacerbated one more time this week when I discovered my bank randomly removed my overdraft limits. Again they confessed it was their error. Accountants and bankers. Their little January jokes on us. Not funny.
FS
No comments:
Post a Comment