Reasons...

… to be cheerful – 131 – The number of £’s I won on the lottery on Saturday night… 4 numbers for the first time ever, and a pick 2, match 2 on the Hotpicks.

… to be guilty – 110 – the number of £’s I added to my winnings to buy myself a new phone. It’s a Samsung U600, and it’s fantastic! 3.2 mega-pixel camera, quad band, FM radio, ultra-thin, 2 touch-sensitive soft keys, black, TV output… and more… and I love it!

… to be less guilty – 90 – the number of £’s it was going to cost me to get that stupid, crappy LG Chocolate phone repaired (for the second time in the space of a year) and sent back to me. First time was a warranty job, but they told me it was outside warranty this time. At least my new phone has a full year’s guarantee with it. Now I can fax them and tell them to stick it sideways.

… to be less guilty (again) – 2 – the approx age in years of the Samsung D500 I’m using at the moment, and which is probably overdue to snuff it, even though it’s working fine at the moment.

… to be hacked off – 8 and a half – the time (8:30am) I had to be at work yesterday because boss had to go out, and Flunky was stuck across the Firth coz the boats weren’t running. He got back at half 11 or so in the morning.

… to be less hacked off – 4 and a half – the time (4:30pm) that the boss let me clear off early for being in early.

… to be hacked off again – 1 – the ear I must have got water in washing my hair yesterday morning, and which I’m now deaf in.

… to be afraid, very afraid – 1 – weeks to my exam!

… to be bored – 1 – I’m at work.

… to be hungry – 2 – the sandwiches in my bag that I’ve not had peace to nosh yet. And they’re Red Leicester cheese, which I’ve re-kindled my love affair with, after being unfaithful with a flexible Italian (Mozzarella) for a while.

Fucking LG!

I got a letter today informing me that the fault in my LG Chocolate phone ISN'T repairable under warranty (despite being the second time in just over a year that it's happened), and providing me with a quote for repair....









..... for just shy of £90!

Chancing bunch of wankers! I am so unimpressed!

People, I implore you.... never buy one of their phones!

It's Good To Talk...

and text... and use ultra-hyper-triple fast broadband - Well, at least is would be, if it wasn't for the fact that the service providers I use for my mobile and my Internet access are both being utter prats at the moment! So it's time to name and shame...

First up, O2... Suddenly about half past 11 this morning I stopped being able to send texts, and I couldn't understand why, coz I knew I'd definitely paid my bill this month - so I put it down to network problems or something like that (and there were a couple of times when I looked at the screen and it said "Limited Service"). Well, after work, I was trying to phone somewhere... and the stupid, pompous-voiced woman that they have doing their recorded messages said "Calls can not be made from this mobile phone... please hold while we transfer you to your airtime provider." - So I held... and eventually got to speak to someone who told me that my last payment had been something like £12 short, and so there was a bar on my phone!

Now, the bit I can't understand about it is this... I made a payment a couple of weeks ago... via the automated payment line - which TELLS you how much you have to pay, coz it says "Please confirm that you want the sum of £xx.xx charged to your card"... and I paid the full amount it told me I had to. Now I checked the notification email I received again tonight, and the amount I was asked to pay, and paid, was the month before's bill amount... not this month's! Sure enough, THIS month's bill was for the bigger amount. So, the upshot was I paid the £12 and the bar came off my phone, but I still don't understand why that happened...

And bloody PlusNet are being wassocks again - not with their spam this time (which seems to have lessened a bit the last couple of days, but don't tell them that, or there'll be 300 offers for Viagra / cheap watches / dodgy degrees sitting in my in-box when I go into work tomorrow!)... This time there's been some sort of exchange fault or something technical like that, which has apparently been fixed, except my broadband (and my brother's for some reason) is still running like an arthritic tortoise! I just requested a speed upgrade from 2.2mbps to maximum 8mbps, and in theory now my broadband is running at 5.6mbps... I say "in theory", coz it's as slow as the sun on the fucking wall, and I can't do things like watch any of the YouTube videos I'm posting, coz they play about 4 seconds and then crawl for half an hour before playing another 4 seconds. And, for some reason, if I try to watch videos on other blogs they only play about 9 or 10 seconds and then it's like the video's finished, coz it comes up with the end screen and asks if I want to re-play the vid!

I hope it's only my computer doing that, and that you wonderful blog readers can enjoy the videos in full.

Aside from that, I've reported the faults in my LG chocolate phone to LG, and it's all ready to parcel up and send off to them... and I'm resisting the temptation to enclose a "shove it up yer erse" note with it - I love the phone, there's just no way on God's green earth that I would ever recommend to anyone that they buy one of the damned things!

Isn't technology great? What would we do without it?

I Am A Domestic Goddess.... Not!

But more of that in a minute... let's get the how I slept / work thing over with first...

I got to sleep earlier last night than the night before - it was 4am instead of 5! But at least I managed not to sleep in today. Work (as you may have gathered from my morning post) was boooooooooooooooring. See, that's the problem with being up-to-date... you sweat and struggle to get there, then you have a few slow days where there's no new stuff coming in, and you're left twiddling your thumbs.

Now, here comes the domestic goddess bit... For the last few Thursday nights, I've been having some help come in to give me a hand sorting through Mum & Dad's stuff, and helping take it away for dumping. Don't get me wrong, I loved Mum & Dad, but Dad in particular was a hoarder, and there's a good few years worth of junk around the place that was kept "in case it was valuable". And between his books, and Mum's ornaments, there's a LOT of stuff to be dumped. So, that's what I was doing after work tonight... going through old letters and the like and dumping them, and getting rid of some of their clothes - which I'm dumping. I know charity shops need clothes, but Orkney's a small place, and I'd hate to walk down the street and see some woman wearing a coat that looks familiar and thinking "I wonder if that's Mum's?"... I'm sorry, I just couldn't do it, so it's better to dump it all.

And then, when my helper went away, I learnt a valuable lesson - I started to make my tea (just microwave spag bol), and I was going to fry some diced bacon to give it a little extra flavour... but I went to the loo first, and changed out of my top I'd been wearing while working... and then I came back to the kitchen - and realised that I'd sprayed the frying pan with some of that spray-on cooking oil... and left it on the cooker at 6! Thankfully there was no fire, and not much smoke, but the oil in the pan was nearly black and it was HOT! I dashed to the sink with it and shoved it into the washing bowl of water, and it sizzled and steamed like buggery! But, hey, the pan was okay.

And I'm having one of those spells where all the electrical & technical gizmos around me are packing up - today I had to get a new hoover, coz I've got 2, neither of which work worth a damn, so they've been chucked... and I've been wondering why NOBODY has phoned me on the landline for the last month - not even someone trying to sell me anything! Well, it transpires I'm not a Gilly-No-Mates after all... the ringer of my phone's not working...! But, these are the joys of working for an electrical shop - I got a digital cordless phone, and a new hoover (I say "got" - I paid for the phone (less £5 staff discount), and the boss owns a little more of my soul until I can afford to pay for the hoover).

And these things come in 3's... Do you remember the saga of my fancy LG Chocolate phone? The one that cost £250 (or a bit more of my soul) and then had to go away to be repaired because the cable in the slide mechanism was dodgy and the screen kept going funny? And sometimes people could hear me, but I couldn't hear them? Well, I've now had it just little over a year, and the fucking screen's going blank and breaking up on me AGAIN! I'm telling you, folks, I like the phone... I really want to say it's perfect, coz it's sleek, sexy, thin and has the fancy touchpad which I really like now I'm used to it... but I don't think I'd have an LG again. What's the use of having a sexy little phone if it's not reliable? I think next time I need a new phone, I'll go back to Nokia. Their cameras in the phones might be shit, but at least the phones themselves work.

Well, it's later than this post says it is, and you're bound to have had enough of me waffling on today... so I'm going to bugger off to bed soon... after I've done one little job for a certain Lord O.

Cheerio!