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rememberwhenyoutried:

wifbeoforbunny replied to your post: “It’s a shame our ADSL provider only lists our peak data transfer; I…”:

bt tells you if they have them

I thought about switching to BT when our old contract ended, but we got like three months free if we went with this fly-by-night operation who barely have a website, so.

Our phoneline here is the crappiest (2 megabytes per second on a good day) so it didn’t seem worth switching to a bigger provider.

Seriously, never switch to BT.

My experience with BT was them providing equipment that did work, replacing it with equipment that didn’t work, denying that there was a problem with a phone-cum-router that half of the features didn’t work on and that needed to be physically switched off-and-on most days to function for most of the 24 hours. No one at their customer service appeared to have even the faintest notion of how to read or add notes to a complaint, which meant that each time I’d have to go through the whole thing from the beginning… and then they would never call me back when they said they would, if at all.

Finally, when I wanted to leave they kept hassling me at all hours of the day to ask why I was leaving.

Never switch to BT.

That is my advice….

It has come to my attention that if I go to the Christmas Party this year at work I will have to wear a new dress. This is because my one viable party dress, which I like very much, I wore last year. To the only work event I’ve been to, with the same people who’ll no doubt go this year, and I like to at least pretend to own more than one item of posh clothing*.

Therefore I will have to go dress shopping.

There are no words for how much I hate, loathe and despise dress shopping. It is an experience which feels personally tailored to hit all of the things I dislike about my body and make them prominent and totally and utterly depressing. 

Essentially I go try on dresses, go ‘oh, I look like a pudgy weetabix in a dress’ and take them off again. Or, on more depressing occasions, ‘wow, this looks great, apart from the fact that I can’t get my enormous broad shoulders into it’. *sigh*

Then I swear, hand on heart, that I will exercise this year and this will be the year that I lose the podge that I loathe.

And then I don’t.

And then this happens.

Did I mention, I *hate* dress shopping.

* Technically I also own a very nice, if rather revealing, Chinese style dress. Which I’ve worn to other works’ other events. But I’m not sure I can carry it off anymore, as I seem to have got podgier despite cycling and eating more healthily. My body and I, we don’t get on well.

So yes, the roof. Our house is, almost certainly, sporting its 1936 era double roman roof tiled glory. It’s possible, given that it’s been lined with some sort of tarry-paper-stuff that it’s been re-roofed at some point in its lifetime, but it was certainly not a recent event.

Unfortunately, as some of you already know, the roof leaks, a teeny tiny bit in one of the lead valleys between the pitched roof and the dormer type affair above the bay. I did try and get this fixed. But eventually I got fed up with ringing / e-mailing / text messaging people who didn’t turn up. And the one guy who seemed really optimistic we asked him to move his planned date (before he’d approved it with us) and he disappeared. For a long time. Unfortunately, since it’s such a slow / minor leak I eventually stopped remembering to try and prod the chosen person.

And me, being me, I finally gave up and all through the summer thought ‘I really should get the roof fixed’. Which leads us to now, where after several days of persistent rain I can say, ‘oh bollocks, it’s leaking again’.

So I messaged him, because it happened to be Sunday, and got a nice message back saying ‘oh my god, I completely forgot to get back to you’. Unfortunately, he’s now changed scaffolder, putting the price up by around £100 (although he says the new scaffolder is much better’n the old one). Also, it means that in the month running up to Christmas we’re going to be spending £1000 on the house. All those nice Agency shifts I’d scheduled to make up the difference between buying the Toyota and selling the Austin? Now going on the roof.

Which is a deep joy.

Especially since we’re trying to work out a way to leave the country quicker than we had been*. Feh. (Double Feh, not aided by the fact I’m on nights again this weekend, which is not something I’m deeply looking forward to).

* Many sums, fleshing out of ideas, scrapping them… We have this great idea, but the details are a bit sketchy and it requires a kickstarter…