TGIF!

Katherine had to put grumpalumps into the box today. Friday started off really well with an early morning start of 4.30am.

Yah!

Then I checked the Internet connection and found that both it and the phone weren't working for the third day in a row.

Yah!

Then I checked my bank account to see that no royalties had been paid yet again, and then managed to track down a statement that said rather than the EFT that I'd signed up for I would instead be paid via wire transfer. Once my balance managed to hit the minimum threshold.

Needless to say the threshold hadn't been reached. Still hasn't. All payments are now forever in limbo.

Yah! There's nothing like being so poor that people don't even think it's worth the trouble to pay you to make you feel like a success. At 6.20am in the morning.

And then there were the constant floods of emails for problems that had started, been discovered, recurred, been rediscovered, thought were fixed but turned out resolution was for a different problem than the one that was actually causing problems - you know, the one I'd been told to fix rather the thing that actually needed fixing.

Yah! 7.30am.

Well at least I could crawl my way through the randomly awful day and then go out to buy a nice lunch. A nice lunch that turned out to cost $4.00 more than the last time I'd been to the restaurant - two weeks ago!? - for a sandwich with a new filling. Not the filling they said it would be filled with, that would be humorous nonsense, but the filling they presumably had on hand.

And lovely french bread. Four inches of lovely crusty french bread. Lovely crusty french bread that had spend at least two hours in a moisture filled refrigerator so it was dense and chewy. Not the dense and chewy of a beautiful, rich, dark, pumperknickel loaf carefully hand-ground, crafted and slow-baked in an artisinal oven. No. The dense and chewy of something that's meant to be light and crusty but dropped out of school early and started snorting meth.

I pulled the two mouthfuls of oil-covered plain chicken out, that's PLAIN chicken not the SMOKED chicken that I'd paid for, and then threw the rest away. So I had to buy a second lunch from the downstairs cafe, which was half the price and twice the edibility, but unfortunately was purchased so late in my lunch half-hour that I had to wolf it down (yeah, okay, the gnawing hunger may have contributed somewhat to that scenario.)

My lunchtime ended with a phone-call from a communications engineer who was disgruntled that I had the temerity to be at work during the day when he'd responded to my urgent call for assistance with the complete lack of internet or phone at our home within a mere 72 hours of calling. He was further put out when I timidly suggested that I may be able to get home by five o'clock - because surely all mortals are aware that technicians finish work on the dot of four-thirty.

So with the promise of an hour's overtime on Monday I skipped away from work early. There was a steady stream of traffic blocking our exit, and then when we finally pulled into the flow of traffic two trains decided to go past on the tracks while we sat staring at them in astonishment. Since when did the South Island have TWO trains?

But we forged ahead, to encounter a slow-mo traffic flow which we eventually crawled far enough along to realise was caused by the road-works (which we knew about) coinciding with a major set of traffic lights not working (which we didn't.)

Then I arrived home to find that all that was in the mail was a bill, all that was in the cupboard was some sugar-free cookies past their expiration date, and all that was in my heart was despair.

And then the lovely repair technician turned up and got our internet working in about ten minutes, said they'd need to reblow the fibre from the gate but we didn't need to be home for that and they'd do it early next week, and then my darling said he could put on a full packet of oven-fried chips and I could have half. Which I enjoyed with my favourite protein; tomato sauce and peri-peri mayonnaise. (Wot?)

And tomorrow it's Saturday. And I don't care that the weather is crap all weekend because I don't like to go outside anyway.

Things are definitely improving around here.