Another Week, Another Rant

Another week of disruption.  Surely, at some point soon, I'll be allowed to have a normal week, where everything goes to schedule, nothing goes wrong and there are no unexpected events.  After spending most of my week off last week battling a series of illnesses and warning lights suddenly showing in my car, I was hoping that this week was going to be that trouble free week.  Sadly, it wasn't to be.  Not only did the car problems extend into this week, with the garage dicking me around no end and taking days to fix a relatively straightforward problem, (why is it that some people can't grasp the concept that as my vehicle is essential for work, it is essential they keep to their promise it will be ready by lunchtime Monday at the latest and instead take an additional twenty four hours to do the job, causing me massive disruption to my work?).  Financially, the shenanigans with the car couldn't have come at a worse time, as this is also the week I was paying off the builders for the work on the roof.  I know that most of the latter money will be repaid to me by the insurance company, but it is still painful to part with that much money in one week.

If I'd hoped that things would get better in the latter half of the week, I was to be proven sadly mistaken.  Today came a 'double whammy'.  Firstly, I was forced to waste a large chunk of my lunch hour buying a single stamp.  That's right, a single first class stamp.  Have you been to your local main post office branch lately? I hadn't, as I don't send many letters or parcels and do things like tax discs online.  So I was perplexed to find that, instead of having the option to go to the post office shop counter and purchase a single stamp from a human assistant, I was now forced to deal with something akin to those self service checkouts at supermarkets.  They seemed to be designed primarily for people to weigh parcels, calculate the postage then buy the requisite stamps.  For simply buying a stamp it is gross overkill and highly confusing.  If, by replacing the counter with these monstrosities, they hope to save on the cost of the staff manning the counter, it's a false economy as they still have to have a member of staff on hand to explain to us customers how to use the bloody things.  Why can't we just have a straightforward, old-style stamp machine?

Anyway, the second part of the 'double whammy' was suffering another power outage when I finally got home for my lunch.  I really thought we'd put this nonsense behind us and the power company had finally pulled its finger out and devoted some small part of its obscene profits to sorting out the problems with the local electricity sub-station.  Today's outage was particularly irksome as it meant my attempts to record The Day Time Ended from Movies4Men was in vain - and there's no sign of it reappearing in the schedules any time soon.  Scottish and Southern Electricity really are a pack of arseholes!