Week 149
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Some progress with the electricity situation: theyāve amended a meter reading. But I think Iām being charged the normal rate for my off-peak usage, and the off-peak rate for the other usage, which would mean my sometimes parsimonious carefulness about when I use certain appliances has all been for nothing. I tried to say this on the phone, but they insisted the readings were āall in lineā now, which, well, they would be if theyāre all consistently wrong.
But Iāll wait for the next proper bill, and maybe itāll be all right and theyāre more competent than they appear. And maybe itās a crumb of comfort to imagine that, given the high wholesale price, theyāre probably still losing money even if theyāre possibly overcharging me.
A plummy-voiced robot did a follow-up call to asking me to rate my experience, and of course I gave their staff full marks for friendliness ā actually, they werenāt that friendly, and it would have been unsettling if they had been ā but no I wouldnāt recommend them to a friend.
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The adverts on twitter dot com: mostly crypto-bollocks, interspersed with weird mining company lobbyism.
Actually, around the season of Advent, there were some good ones promoting imported curios like this Cute Stealing Coins Cents Penny Cat Money Box Saving Money Collecting Money Piggy Bank for Kids Kids (Cute Yellow Cat), which I just think is neat ā pointless, yes, but also art. And elasticated covers for making a horrible sofa look pretty, which ought to be right up my street. But I havenāt bought either.
The adverts on bus times dot org: the London International Mime Festival. Which Iām delighted by.
The weird, Teutonic fraud has started again, but thereās no suggestion that itās anything to worry about. If I wanted to know exactly, fine-grainedly, how much money the website was making day by day, Iād be annoyed because the ānoiseā of all the robotsā clicking makes that hard to know, but donāt so Iām not. (Unnerving to see in those old weeknotes that I was banging on about water meters, how boring.)
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Spent some time on a bicycle in the low sun, and may have taken a photograph of a bus or two ā itās a cruel irony that the time when the roads are most muddy and gritty, i.e. now, is the same time that bus washes are most likely to freeze over. And squelched around a marsh, which brought some small joy, but hereās a tip for me for next time: wear some wellington boots.
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A year ago, I heard Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi talking about Vladimir Putin, and I often think about the way they said āPootunā with like a Norfolk accent.