Mobile money

My bank account is considerably lighter, but I do have a car that goes.  Which is a good thing I suppose.

I did not allow my features to crack into anything approaching a smile when I paid over the money.  All that money.  Money gone.  All of it.

But it’s only money after all.  Money that could have been spent on things made of metal with flashing lights.  But spent instead on something as mundane as a bloody clutch.

Then it was off to one of the worst medical facilities that it has been our misfortune to patronise with our ailments, or at least with Toni’s ailments.  They way that his knee has been seen to, or rather not seen to.  For physiotherapy the most helpful person who saw to him was a lab technician rather than a trained physio.

The information given to him has been sketchy and, in spite of their inability to diagnose what was happening from an x-ray they delayed giving him a magnetic resonance scan until god knows what other damage had been done.

Today was the getting of the copy of the scan on a CD.  Needless to say there was neither a parking space nor a CD when we got there.  When Toni asked for his disk he was given some unreasonable excuse why it wasn’t ready and was asked to give them an extra 15 minutes to make the disk.  Meanwhile I prowled around the parking area circulating in my newly repaired car like a motorized stalker.

When we finally got a parking space with Toni standing sentinel over the gap and then went for a rather frosty coffee – the atmosphere, not the drink.  Fifteen minutes up Toni stomped back and, sure enough, the woman he was supposed to see was not only not there but also had left the telephone off the hook.

Frost became glacial.

The woman reappeared and ignored Toni’s greeting and proceeded to shout into the off-hooked phone until she hung up with a wry smile.

Amazingly she got Toni’s CD and handed it to him without a word and we left hurriedly before anything else could go wrong.

A certain triumphal thaw continued through lunch which we had in a celebratory sort of way in our favourite (and cheap) restaurant in the centre of the town.

With the newly mobile car we called into Lidl after lunch and stocked up with the heavier good which immobility had denied us: milk and water.  And a few other bits and pieces – including a sonic cleaner, a watch display case and a multi-charger tray, and some food.  And yes, I did remember the milk and water.

I have made a halfhearted attempt to try (yet again) to bring some sense of order into the welter of serpentine horror that comprises my expanding collection of gadget power leads.  I am hoping that the new “tray” which is not one of those new-fangled things that recharges the device merely by resting on a special surface but rather a fairly basic container with DC outlets for five or six leads to be permanently connected but hidden out of sight until needed.  There is even a label you can use to identify each one.  Nothing really new about the device, but the combination of things will be useful I think.

Meanwhile the trip to the dentist beckons.