wendy house

I’ve signed-up to receive offers from Living Social.

At first the offers were on a broad range of topics. The advertising photographs showed a people of different genders and ages demonstrating the product or service use.  Great diversity. I enjoyed looking at the possibilities and even purchased a few mixed gender, mixed ages, activity breaks.

More recently the offers that they send me show bigger discounts, but are on a more restricted range of topics. A lot of offers that are tailored to a stereotypical young female paranoid about how she, and her home, looks – make-up, hair, diets, cooking, manicures, vacuum cleaners etc. The pictures of people using the services are females that are almost exclusively young, curvaceous, with long hair, fully made-up, smooth skinned.

I feel hassled and oppressed by the algorithm they are using to select the offers that they email to me.

I’m progressively uninspired by the offers that they send me.

I’ve stopped using the offers – they’ve lost my custom.

I’ve written to Living Social to ask them to change the algorithm they are using to send me offers – to regain my custom.  I don’t think Living Social will be able to update their algorithm just for me. Maybe I should re-register with a boys name and see if I can regain the diversity and activity oriented offers that I saw before Living Social decided to push the popular female stereotype at me.

When I got to work I found the door kicked-in and half a dozen laptops stolen. Booo!

The desktop computer I was planning to use wasn’t stolen. Phew!

When I turned it on this frustrating black message showed-up.  Disbelievingly I rebooted the computer 3 x. Just incase. It didn’t make any difference.  Poo!

Our IT department had a super-hero taking-out the hard drive and getting my stuff on a working (Apple) hard drive, in less than 30 minutes.  Though I suspect that actually having an external boot disc for the computer would have been much quicker.  But who uses external boot CD’s these days?!

After such a dramatic ‘where’s my computer gone’ day at work I was relieved to be home.  The Cupboard had other ideas. She was considering a sympathy suicide. She leapt to the floor. Bollocks. She may have shown me a blue screen of death, but all I can remember was this monochrome thing when I attempted a reboot to fix it.   She’s defintiely passed away.

Dad has always claimed that I have special powers over electrical equipment. He’s an electrician, he knows these things. He says I can break electrical goods by merely looking at them.  I was never allowed to go near electrical equipment as a child.  At least it was for a good reason, not like -  ‘you can’t do that you’re a girl’. My life experience suggests that dad was onto something.

I need a new computer….. oooooeererrr.

Hooray!  New toy!

What should I get? ipad? Chrome thingy? Surface thingy?

4pm 15th August: RBH are not expecting me.

I wandered to the Royal Berkshire Hospital (RBH) to

• find out where I needed to go.
• personally doublecheck tomorrows appointment time.
• hand-over my Worthing Hospital CD of notes and X-rays.

The Royal Berkshire Fracture Clinic weren’t expecting me.  They had no appointment booked and no record of a phonecall about me. They didn’t want my CD to check my notes in advance of the non-existent appointment. I felt betrayed by Worthing hospital not having clearly established the appointment with RBH.

The RBH Fracture clinic reception staff were not happy at my turning-up, unannounced. They tutted and huffed at the inconvenience. I quietly cried. They ignored my tears making it easier to let those tears flow.

They double-booked me into the a clinic on the morning of the 16th.

midnight 13th/14th August

By midnight I’m tired, in pain, lonely, nowhere to go, no book to read and with the prospect of 10 more hours of this.

Barely holding back the tears of temporary, pure, sadness.

I’ll feel better after a good sleep. I’m a talented sleeper. I can sleep almost anywhere. I lay my jacket on the floor against the wall in a quieter part of A&E, then gently lay myself on top of it and started drifting into much needed sleep.

This action removed my invisibility-to-hospital-staff cloak. Staff started waking me up to ask me what was happening.

I don’t know….

mumbled between my tears

Within 10 minutes they’d moved me to a ward and a bed.

The only bog I want to see from now on is white and made of porcelain (anon)

Before karmic predictability brings the awards for the mountain highs I am proud to present the gold winner of our Snowdonia hiking teams’  lowest experience:

Gold winner: spongy bog

The bog and lack of opportunites it ironically supplied for private, midgeless, ‘wild wees’ were the lowest point of our Tryfan hike.

The bog on Tryfan is high up, soon after the relief of summiting. It’s relatively flat open land on a gently curving ridge. See how pretty it looks:

It’s like walking on a sodden sponge

schhhhlllllop….. ….schhhhhlllllup…. ….sccchhhhhhhhhhllllllllop

There were times when I wanted to use both of my hands to pull my foot out from its last step. Thank goodness for waterproof, tightly tied-on boots. One walker demonstrated that his 6ft pole was easily swallowed by the bog, just a few feet away from our trail.  That depth of water could easily submerge everyone of our party. We cautiously stayed on-trail, behind our guide. Hmmmm….   …..nice firm looking bottom ahead…..

All this water and nowhere to pee in privacy, not a pert little boulder or little rise to sneak behind. The sound of schlurping water taunted our middle-aged bladders. 10 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour on the bog….  it just goes on and on and on….

The bog broke our spirits as surely as chinese water torture.

This experience achieved ‘3 Frowns’        on the Wendy House rating scale -  Ratings explained

Optical Express said they could replace the lenses in my ski-chic wrap-around graduated-grey tint,  reflective Ray Bans for a reasonable price. Hooray. Phew! I was thrilled at being able to get the lenses replaced in my favourite glasses.

That’s the highlight of the story over. It’s downhill from here on in, though luckily no broken bones.

3 frowns: Ratings explained

The following summary actually omits many of the details that added to the paucity of my experience. I made 4 trips to pick up my glasses, each time and transport:

1. Optical Express explained that their ‘labs’ no longer had the specialist equipment so the glasses had been sent to another lab and I’d have to come back next week
2. On this visit they made me wait in line, did not know what had happened even after checking their computers to find that my glasses work had been put ‘on hold’. The labs were not answering the phone so they suggested that I come back next week,  when they knew more, Sigh
3. This visit they explained that actually they could not fit new lenses in my current frames, but they could give me 5%  (about £6.00) on a different, new, set of Ray Ban frames. This discount amounted to less than my cumulative busfares for the previous trips to pick up the glasses. I turned down the measley offer, explaining why, and asked for my glasses back saying I would go elsewhere. This prompted them to offer 50% off a new frame (£60) which I rashly accepted, and selected a Holly Golightly pair of Ray Bans
4. Finally picked up my old glasses, without new lenses, and new glasses with new lenses. New lenses were scratched. How poor is that? I gave-up and walked out

It seems that British optical laboratories provide customers with substantially fewer lens treatment and fitting services than those in the USA (tint colours, coatings). Opticians prefer to sell you a whole new pair of glasses than try and replace lenses in existing frames. Even more sadly, Optical Express lead me to believe they could supply a service that they could not, then compounded this by substandard service. I’ll be going elsewhere to replace the lenses in my other glasses.

Generally rather disappointing

Ever wondered what Wendy review ratings really mean?   You need wonder no more.    Rating system explained:

Don’t touch this,   lest it be contagious or induce severe fits followed by sudden brain death

No.   It’s just wrong,   so wrong.   Turn around an walk away before anything valuable  like sanity or toothbrush gets broken

Thow the phone down.     Icky, icky, icky,   could prompt a minor tantrum involving  some small hand-held household item hitting the floor with a little more speed then naturally supplied by gravity    

Wince making.   What were they thinking?   Walk away now  

Why?   Even lashings of tea and biscuits couldn’t make this work  

Mining required.   Get your spade out,   if you are  prepared to put the effort into  digging for it you’ll find some virtue buried somewhere in this  

Darn good.   Like a pint of well kept real Ale  from a cask in good company,   or a Sunday morning reading a broadsheet in bed with the  fluff-balls snoring nearby    

Lovelly.   Simply world class talent.   Easily recommended and probably even remembered,   which given my scattiness is a major achievement      

Gorgeous.   Oh!   that was good for me.    Expect this review to include a bit of gushing because  the work has  genius potential      

Hero Worship.     Realised genius, lets do it again,   and again,   and again.   There’s a stong risk that Wendy’s planning a proposal.