Cracked Time

 

This morning, while swimming back down the pool, my left hand inadvertently hit the side of the pool, not hard enough to hurt myself, but hard enough to find the sweet spot of my smart watch’s screen and crack the face and take a small but essential chunk out of the strengthened glass.  To be fair to the timepiece, it is still telling the time, but the touch sensitive quality of the broken screen is not irreparably lost.

     To someone like myself, a noted relojophile (I think the combination of Spanish and Greek in that neologism is more than satisfying) a broken watch is not a disaster, it is far more an opportunity.

     I could, of course, go to my boxed collection of older watches and choose one (or twenty!) to attach to my wrist, and there might even be a few rejected smart watches to choose. 

I could also, as I am at the moment, revert to and wear my ‘emergency’ watch, a Seiko that almost comically ticks almost all of the boxes for a perfect watch.  The model is a Seiko ‘Rail Road Approved’ smallish white face, with Arabic numbers, day/date, sweep second hand, luminous hour and minute hands, waterproof for swimming, and solar charging.  I leave it out on a sunny shelf and it is constantly ready to head wristward should anything untoward happen to my smart watch of choice: the Amazfit GTR.

     As I said, I do have choices, many choices, to replace the broken watch, and the replacement was on sale in Amazon and other outlets for a more than reasonable prime considering what the watch can actually do.  But, as I also said, I see destruction as a chance to try and better what I had.

     As with smart watches, so with mobile phones, we seem to have reached a stage in their development where we are asked to pay more and more for what I seem to remember from painful A Level economics classes is “eventually diminishing” returns.  The so-called ‘flagship’ phones of all the major brands (including those who used to be considered budget but excellent value for money) are absurdly expensive, and if you go to the extent of getting a foldable phone, astronomically expensive!  And, of all the much-vaunted attributes of the machine, how many are actually used by the individual purchaser?  Like computers and the programs that we use on them, we (well, I) barely scrape the surface of what they can do.

     If I am truthful about my smart watch use, I need the thing to tell the time with an always-on display and count my lengths while I swim and the distance I go for my morning bike ride after my swim.  And that’s just about it.  My simple demands do not, of course, stop me from pouring over the almost unending list of things that my watch could do if I understood how to get it to do it.  I find it difficult enough to get my watch to evaluate my exercise before my swim and then to switch to counting my lengths – something to do with moisture on the touch sensitive screen, and it’s always touch and go about whether I can make the thing work.

     Informing me about the receipt of emails and messages, linking to Alexa, storing music, remotely answering my mobile phone and all the other things that the watch allegedly finds simplicity itself, become much more complicated when I get my hands on the thing and the functioning of all these add-ons becomes much more problematical.

     But, with watches, I am an eternal optimist.  I believe in the incrementally commercially inexorable movement towards horological perfection and that what I experienced only imperfectly in one iteration of the watch will become sublime in a later one.

     I suppose that all of the above is going a long way round the houses to say that instead of using one or other of my numerous watches to fill the gap left by my broken (but still time telling) one, I decided after a Nano second’s hesitation to buy new.

     And not only new, but also falling into the patently obvious manufacturer’s trap of a so-called ‘limited edition’ version of something I could have got cheaper in its un-limited form. 

     But, I am ashamed (and yet defiant) to admit, that I was seduced by a bit of bling (it is gold coloured) and by the fact that it comes in a much nicer and more sophisticated box than the common or garden version!

     Sometimes I surprise even myself by how gullible I am when confronted by blatant ego flattering commercialism, but, as I am sure Truss the Heartless Far Right Zealot would assure me, my purchase is doing its bit to ensure the ‘trickle down’ of wealth!

     For some strange reason that thought does not  comfort me.  At all.

Something needs to be done! Now!

 

In my consumer relations with various retail outlets there comes a time in our negotiations to try and right the wrongs that I feel have been done to me, when I feel the need to silently hand over a small printed card with the following message on it: “I am middle class, literate and tenacious.  Give up now while you still have some self respect, because you WILL NOT WIN.”

      I hasten to assure you that I haven’t actually handed over such a card, let alone printed one out, but it would have saved my shop-related opponents a great deal of time and effort.

     I remember watching one film about an evil insurance company (are there any other types?) where the default position to ANY claim made was, in the first instance, to refuse it.  As insurance companies have impressive financial resources and equally striking headed notepaper for their official missives to the grasping customers who have the unheard of audacity to expect the companies to do what they were paid to do, i.e. pay up when loss is experienced, there is an element of intimidation used against the clients.

     My father had dealings with one buildings’ insurance company when he claimed for storm damage to a chimney and part of the roof.  The work to repair the faulty structure had to be carried out on an emergency basis and my father was claiming after the fact.  He eventually received a letter informing him that his claim had been processed; a cheque was enclosed, and would be please sign and return the enclosed form.

     Needless to say the cheque came nowhere near the amount claimed and my father rejected the proffered cheque with contempt and started a length letter battle with the company that eventually resulted in a meeting in which my father suggested an independent assessment and arbitration.  He had no idea whether that sort of thing was covered under his policy but it seemed like a good idea and it was the sort of thing that he was teaching in his Liberal Studies lectures and classes (ah, there is a subject title from the brave new world of 60s education!) and it ought to exist.  The difference in the meeting was immediate and it was admitted that he did indeed have recourse to such an approach, but “we needn’t let it get to that sort of level” moderated the previously intransigent attitude of the blood sucking vampiric officials and a mutually satisfactory solution to the problem was soon arrived at.

     What lesson my father drew from his experience was not the quality of his letter writing, though he did regale Mum and me with some of the more lurid passages, but rather the underhand tactics of an unprincipled company.  As he reasoned it, how many people would turn down an actual signed cheque?  They would assume from the ‘official’ documentation accompanying it that the cheque was the end of the matter.  Dad used to talk about the situation of some OAP living alone with little or no support system in place feeling obliged to accept the cheque and being grateful for it!

     Having spurned the cheque it prompted my father into further and higher forms of letter writing, which, as I mentioned was, eventually successful in this particular circumstance and was generally successful whenever he put pen to paper in the interests of personal commercial justice!

     I channel my father when I have contretemps with suppliers who don’t live up to their PAID promises and I OPEN A FILE – dread words indeed!

     The foregoing is not a self-indulgent meandering, it has been prompted by my latest satisfactory outcome.

     I dropped my mobile phone and the glass back of the thing shattered – so much for toughened glass etc.  It shattered.  It still worked and I continued to use it, but this was not a situation that seemed to me to have long-term viability, so I tried to get it repaired.  This is a long story, a very long story, but I intend to cut to the chase.

     The point is not that the shop failed to get the phone repaired, but that they also managed to ‘brick’ it, and told me (eventually) that the phone was beyond economic repair and they would, very kindly, refund the money that I had paid them to replace the back of the phone!

     To be fair to the shop, the repairs were not carried out on the premises, but each shop in the chain sent them to a central technical station in a large Barcelona store.  I was given contradictory, confusing information about what actually had been or had not been done to my phone and the weeks dragged on.  From what they had said to me it seemed reasonable to assume that their attempts to repair had destroyed the phone.  I wanted another.

     The key questions remained (as the shop had my phone and it was not two minutes away from my house) did the thing charge and work.  Yes, I knew the back was smashed, but did it actually work as it did when I handed it in to be repaired?

   This (eventually) resulted in a brief email, which made me wonder if they were actually talking about my phone at all.  They told me it was working, that they had replaced the screen as I had asked (I hadn’t and they hadn’t) but they would give me a new phone.  Not, I might add, a replacement of my expensive phone, but a signally cheaper one, but by the same maker!  And they would pay back any money I had given for work that they had not done.

     I know that I could have held out for a duplicate, but I decided to cut my losses and retire with honour: full refund and spare phone.  Result.

     Because I have bought another phone.  The attempts to repair this phone started months ago, I knew it was going to be a long slog and so I listened to advice from One Who Knows and paid less than a quarter of what I paid for the phone with the smashed back and it does as much and more than the other one did.

     I also have the old phone.  I am not convinced that it is ‘beyond economic repair’ – I think that the shop simply gave up and bought me off.  As I have me new cheap phone and a newer cheaper one (courtesy of the store) I am sufficiently phoned-up to start a length campaign to get me old phone up and running.  At the moment it is charging (just checked 99% charged) and when it is ready I will see what it is still able to do.  If it appears to be serviceable then further steps will be taken to bring it back into full use.

     This particular file is not yet closed!  Not yet a while.

 

Put a spoke in it!

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Why do the spokes on the back wheel of my bike keep breaking?  In all my time of owning bikes in the past this has never happened, but with my new electric bike it happens all the time.

OK, the wheels on this bike are small and I am not, but I refuse to accept the depressing analysis that says that my avoirdupois is the reason for metal failure!  Taking the bike back (again) to the shop, the technician was mystified by the constant breakages.  I have to admit that the original spokes looked somewhat flimsy, but those have been replaced (at great cost) by much sturdier struts and so there is even less justification for breakage.

The shopkeeper did point out my foldylock (one of those jointed thingies that locks your bike to something immovable) and suggested that I might have hit its bulk against the spokes when locking the bike, but this is something that I have thought about too and make every effort to keep foldylock and strut apart.  So the mystery continues as does the outpouring of money.

But the money will have to be paid because I am now reliant on my bike.  This has nothing to do with a zest for exercise, but all to do with the fact that my bike is electric.  This is the sort of bike that I needed when I was growing up in Cardiff.  Living in the suburb of Rumney, going in to the centre of the city was a delight because you could coast your way down the long length of Rumney Hill.  But any delight was limited by the thought that to get home you would have to cycle up it or, following the eminently sensible philosophy of my dad’s “If it’s easier to push the bike than ride it: push it!” by pushing it.  The long slog either way of attacking the slope was waiting and depressing.  How might my early life have changed if all I had had to do was put the bike in first and the assist on five and peddle nonchalantly.

I do not want you to feel that I have succumbed to old age and smile vaguely at passing scenery as I press a button and whizz along.  No, my bike (electric though it is) uses the battery to ‘assist’.  The bike has seven gears and operates as a normal bike if you want it to.  The motor gives you five levels of assist to make the peddling easier.  To be absolutely truthful there is also a throttle which does give you a ‘free ride’ but I tend to use this feature to cross roads where the throttle will propel you forward without the need for clumsy peddling, especially if you are stationary and starting off in seventh gear!

So I am reasonably ‘good’ about the level of cheating that I use with my bike and even though I use the fifth level of assist to go up hills, I leave the bike in seventh gear which means that you still have to peddle to go where you want.

What owning the bike has meant more than anything is that I now use it more.  I am much more likely to go into town on various errands using the bike because not only is it easier to park when you get there, but you are able to enjoy the experience without too much effort.

You also have to bear in mind that I am not in Britain and I do not have to worry as much about rain and cold as I do here.  It is only in the last week or so that I have started wearing a jacket and I am still wearing shorts and sandals!  And as I am typing this, the setting sun is illuminating the tops of the pines and wispy cloud adds interest to an otherwise faultlessly blue sky.  So there is an incentive to get out and about - and to feel good about making the effort too!

My Spanish lessons (two hours, twice a week, subsidised by the city hall, god bless them) are in the centre of Castelldefels in an adult education centre whose immediate vicinity is devoid of free parking spaces.  Or at least the nearest free parking spaces are up a one-in-one hill and ‘officially’ too far away.  On the bike there is no problem as I can lock the thing up next to my classroom and within feet of the front door.  And since the classes started last month there has not been a single occasion where adverse weather conditions have encouraged me to use the car!  Not one!

My bike is also foldable.  Its construction is solid so, although various bits and pieces fold up and down and together it is hardly easy to manhandle into the boot of the car when it needs to go to be seen to, but it can and has been done and will be done again when in an hour or so I go to pick it up so that it will be available for me to go to my lesson tomorrow.  I wonder how much the guy who has repaired the spokes on three or four occasions will have the temerity to charge me?

This typing, as my more experienced readers will have guessed, is more displacement activity than literary endeavour.  I have the exercises 3B in both our textbooks to do on the use of the subjunctive in Spanish.  In one of my informative Spanish/English dictionaries in the middle ‘note’ section the explanation of the subjunctive and when to use it stretches from page 58 to 65 - and that is in note form!  What chance have I got!

Well, I’ve stopped typing, so I will now have to go and get the bike, then it will time for a cup of tea and a little light TV watching - and then copying from the back of the book!

Oh, I have drafted another poem called, 'The Victors' - it's about flies!  You can read it at:

http://smrnewpoems.blogspot.com.es/