The Season Of Mist And Mellow Mistiness

Blimey it's been 2 months since my last post.  Clearly trying to post a photo-a-day didn't stir my blogging gene and even more clearly, I don't live an interesting enough life to blog about it regularly, so what to do ?   Post when the mood takes me ?  Give up completely ?

For now I'm taking the former route and today I'm posting because I got up at 8:10am and so I'm grumpy !

Being up and about......well up at any rate as so far there isn't much "abouting" going on.......at this ungodly time of day has only served to push me further into my SAD state of mind.

SAD is Seasonal Affective Disorder and according to my font of all things medical, Wikipedia, the symptoms may consist of  :

- difficulty waking up in the morning. Absolutely.
- morning sickness.  Thankfully not at all.
- tendency to oversleep and overeat. Definitely.
- a craving for carbs leading to weight gain. Oh hell yes.
- lack of energy. Can't be bothered answering that one.
- difficulty completing tasks.  Ha !  I don't even start tasks.
- withdrawal from social activities.  See above.
- decreased sex drive.   Decreased ? Mine is in neutral and heading for reverse. 

So with all this in mind, I woke at 8:10am and decided to get up and see if an early start would help my mood. Now you need to bear in mind that I never go to bed before 2am and never go to sleep before 3am so rising around 8am is VERY unusual for me.

Has it helped my mood ?  Not so much !  All it's done is give me more hours to be SAD !!

It's October.  It's cold and damp and, this morning at least, very very misty.  So misty in fact that I can barely see the house across the road.

And no, I don't live out in the countryside where my neighbour is 3 miles away and yes, I have opened the curtains.  

It's just freakin' misty.  Proper pea soup misty.  Foggy even.  Yes it's foggy.

And I can't even look forward to the sun burning it off anytime soon.  We probably won't see the sun here again till next summer and even then, only for a fortnight before the nights draw in and it starts all over again. Don't get me started.

As if I needed more reasons to be SAD, Virgin Media has given me one.  They provide my broadband, tv and landline phone service and last weekend, just before midnight on Saturday, the broadband part of this service went down for about 30 hours.  I say "about" because I was asleep on Monday morning when the service returned so I can't be more accurate. But it was over 28 hrs for sure.

Everytime I rang them, I got a recorded message acknowledging the outage in my postcode area, informing me that an engineer was on his/her way and that the approx time for the service being available again would be XX:XX.......a time which kept moving along with each phone call.  Then after 18 hours the message was updated to inform me that the engineer was on site (he/she must've been flown back from their foreign holiday) and they stopped giving an availability time !  

Since its return on Monday morning, I've been trying to find out what caused this outage and why it took so long to fix the fault. I pay Virgin Media £1200 a year for this service and I feel it's only right that they explain such a long break in said service.

I've written to them twice but my emails go to India where their support people live and I think we all know what that means.  I get polite, stock replies which have been pasted into the email and are full of "we understand your concern" and "we are sorry to hear this" type sentences but never do they answer my query. The latest one was a gem.........

"As we're an e-mail support team we do not have the necessary expertise to be able to offer technical advice but we have a technical support team of specialised advisors who will be happy to help you out".

Brilliant. This coming from the contact address on their web site that you are supposed to use for broadband issues.  Don't have the necessary expertise ?  So why is your email address on the web site !?!  And anyway, I'm not asking for technical advice.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.

So yes, this morning I'm SAD and grumpy and frustrated and even a tiny bit angry. Not good reasons for posting a blog but as I can't shout at the Indian call centre staff, I'm using Blogger as my escape valve.  And do you know,  it's working.  The steam is slowly escaping with every letter typed.  

Of course it could be the neat Amaretto in my coffee that's slowly making me more mellow.  Or pissed.  Probably both !!

It's now 10:10am so basic maths tells me 2 hours have passed since I got up and what's occurring ?  Well I've had my coffee and my date & coconut porridge but I'm still half asleep, still half pissed and still can't see the house across the street.  

On second thoughts, I think the mist has gone and I can't see the house across the street because my windows are filthy.

I'd clean them but as you know, I've no energy and can't complete tasks.

That's so SAD.