Sideways

In the normal scheme of things, if you place one foot in front of the other and keep doing it you tend to move forwards. The normal scheme of things doesn’t seem to apply at the moment. Forwards has become sideways.

I meant to write some Christmas cards on Monday and put them in the post. They were on the shelf behind me, along with postage stamps. My youngest daughter “borrowed” them to write cards for her school friends, and used them all. I’ve been too busy to get to the store to buy a box ever since. Hopefully I’ll get into town this lunchtime to buy some more, and then write apologetic messages within the cards explaining their late arrival.

The postal service has been on strike in the UK recently anyway. All post is taking forever to arrive. Perhaps I should blame that?

Alongside that, I switched on my shiny new tablet yesterday afternoon to catch up with email and the screen failed. After a text chat with Amazon they agreed to a replacement and put the order in. WITH A THREE MONTH LEAD TIME.

We once had another tablet fail in the same way – an iPad, that thankfully qualified for the unwritten Apple Store “be awesome” clause (a well known condition that used to exist where if you had a trouble-free track record with Apple and turned up with a broken device, they could replace it with new, no questions asked). Of course we then didn’t qualify, and following a white Macbook (remember them?) slowly disintegrating discovered that “Apple Care” really meant “Apple Doesn’t Care”. Suffice to say we don’t have any Apple hardware in the house any more.

They say challenges happen in threes. I’m wondering what’s going to happen next.