Thursday, August 27, 2009

I was horrid to the Oxfam man...

So, I'm a little slow moving but seriously, not that slow! Not yet...

I'd just finished my tea nad was reclining on the sofa in the hopes of avoiding indigestion when there was an aggressive knock at the door. To be fair, with our door knocker, it is quite hard to do anything but an aggressive knock. I pulled myself off the sofa, already wondering why I was bothering as it wasn't going to be anyone of interest and toddled towards the door. At which point it was knocked aggressively again. I picked up my keys, went into the hall, the person knocked again...

I opened the inner door while they were still fiddling with the knock, perhaps considering a fourth attempt...

On opening the door and seeing it was an Oxfam man...my irritation did not subside. It perhaps increased and I opened with "I heard you the first time". I paused briefly before continuing with "And we already support you". The man, who was not getting the hint said "Ah, but which project?" to which I replied, "I don't know, I don't really care and I'm so much not in the mood." He'd left our front yard before I shut the door.

I feel bad because he had to pull himself together from the shouting pregnant lady and move on to the next house but...I'm not exactly calm yet.

The thing is, although he riled me with his triple knocking impatience and although I generally find people at the door selling things/asking for money pretty irritating, it was actually my final customer at work today who really got me started...

Twenty minutes before I was due to leave, the phone rang. Normally a lengthy call with us is about five minutes long, ten max so I didn't fob the call off on someone else. I really should have.

It started with "My name is Mrs Blah, I'm actually really rather a regular customer in your shop." Right. Not a good start. If you are regular, you don't need to tell us, we know you. She followed it up by telling me that they live pretty much the length of the country from our store. Very regular.
However, they would be coming next week and wanted to be sure that we had everything they wanted to look at. She proceeded to give a comprehensive list and I was able to find everything she wanted. She then passed me on to her husband. How I wish I had passed the phone on too.
Foolishly, I assumed he would be as organised as her...
He began to waffle on through about half the stock we have, not specifying a colour. Or, indeed a size.
I asked him when we discussed the first garment what size he would like and he said "Hmm, it goes from S-XXL, so I imagine XL, possibly XXL." I told him we had a few in XL but XXL was harder to find and we would be unlikely to have any in but could order them for him. We moved on to the next item. Some trousers. I asked for his waist size and he suggested I was being difficult and asking questions too hard for him. I had to simply reply "ok, we've got a reasonable range of sizes, there should be something..." Back to tops. He told me an item and I said "Ah, we're a bit limited at the moment, we don't have any in in extra-large."
"Extra large? I'm not extra large! Dear me, I never said that, I would never say that."
I paused. Took a deep breath. "What size were you interested in then?"
"XL. Or possibly the one down from that. Never extra-large."

I forced myself to physically smile for the rest of the conversation. It was the only way I could hope that I sounded even vaguely interested or polite. Sadly, I will be in store when they come next week. It might of course be fun to point out what S, M, L and XL stand for...someone suggested he might've thought XL meant extremely luxurious...

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

A blog on the page is worth two in the head...

You know what it's like...
You haven't blogged for a while. You've got loads of posts in your head. You've even started to write a few of them.
But it has been too long. You can't just come back with an average post now, can you? You must burst back onto the blogging scene. So every post gets analysed and checked and never finished and certainly never published.
So you wait until your brain totally disengages and you just post whatever - like I did on Friday, about the meercats... but still, a blog on the page is worth more than two in the head, right?!

Friday, August 14, 2009

I like silly things....

So I've had a horrid day. Stupid horrid. Things going wrong, being frustrating, wasting my time blah blah blah.
I have been miserable and grumpy and sad and teary and emotional and horrid to Husbink and slightly loopy and...so on.
This evening, Husbink is building our new wardrobe and I have been sitting on the bed doing jobs on the computer. These jobs included quite a lot of looking at various bits of insurance and so on.
So I was going to look at gocompare.com and confused.com and...then I remembered that someone said that if you actually go to www.comparethemeerkats.com as opposed to comparing the markets...you can do just that...
I laughed. A lot. So, so much. I compared two meerkats, one from Honolulu whose hobbie was battle re-enactments and another from Bangkok who was all very arty...
I cried with laughter as I read the list of hobbies that the meerkats had and which I could choose from. Particularly, I liked "martial artistry" and "belly jiggles".
Ok, so if you spend too much time on comparethemeerkats.com, they do eventually send you to comparethemarkets.com but it's still very good silliness. Or it is when you have previously been having a horrid day.

Friday, August 07, 2009

Multitasking? Cute?

So, when I was about seven, my Brownie troop had a float in the Halloween Parade in our town in New Jersey. (For those of you who haven't experienced that kind of Halloween, it is very, very different to any form of Halloween in the UK - a very family friendly occasion and just a good excuse for a family carnival.) So, we were doing Snow White. There weren't enough of us so do it on our own so we joined with another troop...which led to two Snow Whites because it couldn't be agreed who would provide one...
Anyway. I was a deer. Which was quite nice really cos the costume was warm! So, we'd been told to keep waving and smiling all the way along the parade route. I was a very good little girl, so I did. It was quite late at night though (I have no idea how late but I was very sleepy) and so there I was waving and smiling and doing everything I was told...and yawning...
The parade was always on the local TV station and as our float went past the commentary stand, this was the voiceover... "Oh my, I've just seen the cutest thing! A little deer, waving and smiling and yawning all at once!" ...and there was me, fast becoming the celebrity of the Brownie troop...
Fast forward twenty-blah years to last weekend. We were at a friend's wedding in Cambridge. It was a lovely day but pretty exhausting all that standing around (I quickly found that the miracle heels I bought for a wedding last summer that were much higher than I'd normally wear but had lovely padded soles couldn't tolerate the extra stone and a bit I weigh this year...standing around was not at all comfy (fortunately I had spare shoes that were an improvement)) and the chairs were really not all that fab either. So early evening I'm slumped in a chair, Husbink had brought me a cushion from the car and I'm kind of zoning out from proceedings. In my own little world...one had stroking bump, one hand stroking Husbink's back.
Suddenly there's a flash and I look up confused to see one of the bridesmaids smiling..."rubbing bump and hubby, so maternal, so cute!"
The pic is on facebook with a fairly similar caption...
Multitasking? Cute? ;)