In which I break the rules of a meme. And the world doesn’t end. At least not immediately.

27 July 2007

The very lovely Rayne, queen of surreal tangential thoughts, has very kindly bestowed upon me a Thinking Blogger award.
See? There it is:

She also said some very nice things about me. Well, I’m going to take “Romancer of Gourds” as a compliment, whichever way it was intended. Though my days as a Madam Pumpkin may be over, as there were three female flowers open this morning and there were actual real-life bees buzzing all around, going from the one open male flower to the three ladies. Then there was me in my clodhoppers in the middle of it all, trying not to stand on anything important, ripping open old, dilapidated male flowers to see if there was any pollen left with which I could sprinkle the ladies. Just to be sure. In case those bees were just winding me up and were actually dropping all the pollen on the ground just to spite me.

Technically I’m now meant to bestow the Thinking Blogger Award upon five bloggers I feel are worthy of the honour. But I’m not sure I can bring myself to make that kind of decision without some sort of breakdown. So, how about a story about a toilet instead?

I went to the big Bluewater shopping centre yesterday as Meg the MacBook needed a new battery. I’d left her asleep for too long and her battery had dropped below the minimum charge. Be ye warned. ‘No battery’ said the battery menu. “Nuh-uh,” said I, “Battery.” “No battery”, Meg repeated. We glared at each other for a little while, but we had reached an impasse. Putting John’s battery into Meg worked – the battery from his MacBook that is, not his own personal battery – but on giving Meg back her own battery, she was still having none of it. I could only use her when she was plugged into the mains. Mmm, portable.

I had done a bit of research – Google query: “my battery’s gone bugger up – WTF?” – and found that other people with the same problem had been given a replacement battery by Apple, no problemo. So, I made my appointment with the Genius bar at the Apple Store at Bluewater and took Meg along in her smart red case. Bitch broke my shoulder, having to lug her around all afternoon, but she does at least work properly again now. The Genius took the gone-deaded battery out, scanned … something, went tappety-tap on his keyboard for a while, disappeared, came back with a new battery, put it in, started Meg and – whoopee! – she deigned to accept the presence of a battery. In all this, Mr Genius had spoken roughly two words to me. I guess he was going for the aura of “silent but brilliant”. I signed for the new battery, paid not one magic bean for it and headed out of the shop.

We did a bit of shopping and I got a spritz of some DKNY perfume or other when we went to Boots. The spritzy-woman told me what was in it, but I wasn’t paying full attention at first. I remember she said grapefruit and vodka too, so I was basically wearing a cocktail. But it smelled rather nice and actually stayed on me. I really need to stop being so tight and buy some proper perfume rather than cheap crap. That way, it might stay on me for more than 5 seconds.

Anyway, the toilet. Like the old woman I clearly am, I thought it wise to spend a penny before we headed home. I went to the disabled loo and shut the door. There was no bolt in the lock. A sign on the door told me that to lock the door, I should press the “Lock/Unlock” button on my right. I looked to my right. There was a big silver pad with “Press to open” written on it. Hmm. I poked it and tried the door to make sure. It swung open.

I looked around me and saw that over by the toilet was the aforementioned “Lock/Unlock” button. Clearly, you’re not meant to give locking the door a moment’s thought until you’re already ensconced. I gave the seat a wipe, finding that the yellow bits were actually permanent stains. Great. Reading a notice on the wall, I noted that if I was unhappy with anything in the facilities, I was invited to use the telephone to call management to let them know. The phone that had been removed, I assume.

I came to wash my hands and the tap was neither broken nor spewing forth scalding hot water as has sometimes been the case in disabled loos. Above the sink and above my head-height was a roller towel. Just high enough that it was awkward to pull on the towel to move it around and just crappy enough that I had to pull on it with sufficient oomph to make myself wonder if I wasn’t about to bring the whole thing down on my head. Worn out, I smacked the stupid “Lock/Unlock” button and escaped the adventure in inadequacy.