27 April 2010 (Tuesday) - An Afternoon Off

Some days I feel like I am running round like a headless chicken at work. Other days we seem to have more staff than sense. Today, with seemingly double the staff we had last week, I thought I’d take the opportunity to use up some of my lieu time and I took the afternoon off.

I came home to find my camera case had arrived. I do like buying stuff on eBay. Although it can sometimes be a bit of a gamble, just lately everything I’ve ordered off eBay (except one item delayed by Icelandic volcanoes) has arrived within a couple of days. It’s a good camera case – it’s very pink.

“My Boy ^TM ” was clumping round the house whilst bellowing into his phone. He was planning to take a bird to the seaside. I did tell him that there were plenty of seagulls there already, but he wasn’t having any of it.

Totally by chance, the bank phoned – would I like to borrow a squillion pounds? By one of life’s many co-incidences, one squillion pounds is exactly the amount of money I need to borrow to pay for my new car. So I told the bank I would like a loan, which completely flummoxed the poor girl. She was obviously so used to being told to get knotted that she simply wasn’t expecting anyone to say yes. She then passed me onto someone who claimed her name was Kelly. If her name was really Kelly, then from now on I should be known as Rashid. “Kelly” started her standard spiel. I stopped her and asked her my most important question - how soon I could get my hands on the money? That flummoxed her. She said it depended on where the money was coming from. I might have it in savings, in bonds, on deposit. I asked her what she was talking about, and she admitted she didn’t know. She then put me on to somebody who spoke both scripted and impromptu English and I asked my questions.

She gave me her figures, and I trotted round to the garage to see how much money I could save on the car loan. Despite my being a valued customer entitled to the premium rate loan reserved for the bank’s most valued customers, it was still no cheaper than going with the deal that Renault had already offered, so I shook hands with the salesman, and spent a few minutes looking at my new car. I realise that (apart from the colour) it is pretty much identical to my current car, but it’s still quite exciting.

This car will be my tenth motor vehicle, and I’ve just amazed myself that out of the thing’s nine predecessors, I can only recall the registration numbers of four of them. My DAF, my mini, the Maestro – what were their numbers? My motorbike “Zoomy Petal” – what was his number?

I then mucked about adding an RSS feed to my blog. I have absolutely no idea what an RSS feed is, but if you look at the very bottom of the screen you’ll see there’s a link to it. I was actually trying to blag an animated header similar to that which one of my loyal readers uses on a certain kiting forum, but I got this instead. I wonder what it does….