Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Dreams
Freud tells that all dreams express a wish, possibly a wish which we do not let see the light of day. He gets quite pedantic about it, insisting that all dreams do this. Without being convinced by the all part of this, I did, for once, have such a dream last night. No doubt at all that the dream expressed a now unsatisfiable - if entirely foolish and fantastic - wish. But the content will remain private, having been relegated to the dream zone for a reason!
Another less private wish is that for a new sofa, our Bridgecraft now showing its thirty odd years. Now prompted by an advertisement in the DT to send off for a brochure from what I take to be the successor company at http://www.valebridgecraft.co.uk. Will we be stumping up the £5,000 or so they threaten to charge us for a replacement or will we be trawling E-bay? Sprog 1 alleges that there are plenty of good sofas out there being discarded by those who can afford to change their furniture with their shifting moods and tastes, or perhaps those of Womens' Realm or Vogue or whatever. And one can even ask E-bay to tell one about just those within 1000 metres or whatever one's sofa wheeling range is. Not too hilly around here so a kilometre might be OK - although I suppose that from BH's point of view, being seen wheeling a new-to-us sofa about the streets might rather detract from the newness.
Having got a result from Shippam's paste, moved onto the gas people last week, sending them an email through the 'contact us' part of their customer web site. First email failed at the submit point, second one got through and resulted in an acknowledgement with a reference number and expected time to reply. So far so good. Substantive reply turned up a little out of time. Polite, did not answer the two questions that I had asked and declined to vary my monthly payment - of some £80 - which I had thought was rather a lot. I dare say that they are right and that given that the account being more or less in balance at the end of the high cost winter period was offset by the recent price rises, the monthly amount is about right. But it would have been nice had they bothered to answer the questions I asked. Perhaps they should put a health warning on their 'contact us' page saying that while they endeavour to reply to all questions, their response staff are instructed not to spend more minutes on the reply than half the square root of the monthly payment in pounds - this being in my case about 4.5 minutes, mental arithmetic permitting. Including breaks, so one needs to deduct an allowance for making tea, quality time with colleagues, training time, Internet shopping, comforts breaks, random checks by supervisors and what-not. Say 20%. The 4 minutes remaining would have comfortably enough for the responder to check the amount of my monthly payment and to make minor adjustments to customer brush off number 3 before sending it on to me.
Maybe I am going to have to play the tiresome game of shopping around. Bring back trustworthy nationalised monopolies for utilities! Or am I living on another planet?
Another less private wish is that for a new sofa, our Bridgecraft now showing its thirty odd years. Now prompted by an advertisement in the DT to send off for a brochure from what I take to be the successor company at http://www.valebridgecraft.co.uk. Will we be stumping up the £5,000 or so they threaten to charge us for a replacement or will we be trawling E-bay? Sprog 1 alleges that there are plenty of good sofas out there being discarded by those who can afford to change their furniture with their shifting moods and tastes, or perhaps those of Womens' Realm or Vogue or whatever. And one can even ask E-bay to tell one about just those within 1000 metres or whatever one's sofa wheeling range is. Not too hilly around here so a kilometre might be OK - although I suppose that from BH's point of view, being seen wheeling a new-to-us sofa about the streets might rather detract from the newness.
Having got a result from Shippam's paste, moved onto the gas people last week, sending them an email through the 'contact us' part of their customer web site. First email failed at the submit point, second one got through and resulted in an acknowledgement with a reference number and expected time to reply. So far so good. Substantive reply turned up a little out of time. Polite, did not answer the two questions that I had asked and declined to vary my monthly payment - of some £80 - which I had thought was rather a lot. I dare say that they are right and that given that the account being more or less in balance at the end of the high cost winter period was offset by the recent price rises, the monthly amount is about right. But it would have been nice had they bothered to answer the questions I asked. Perhaps they should put a health warning on their 'contact us' page saying that while they endeavour to reply to all questions, their response staff are instructed not to spend more minutes on the reply than half the square root of the monthly payment in pounds - this being in my case about 4.5 minutes, mental arithmetic permitting. Including breaks, so one needs to deduct an allowance for making tea, quality time with colleagues, training time, Internet shopping, comforts breaks, random checks by supervisors and what-not. Say 20%. The 4 minutes remaining would have comfortably enough for the responder to check the amount of my monthly payment and to make minor adjustments to customer brush off number 3 before sending it on to me.
Maybe I am going to have to play the tiresome game of shopping around. Bring back trustworthy nationalised monopolies for utilities! Or am I living on another planet?
# posted by Jim @ 1:58 AM 
