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kaberett... because I was most of the way through doing morning balance work while brushing my teeth when I abruptly needed to Not Be Upright, Right Now.
So I e-mailed in! And spent the morning feeling groggy and miserable on the sofa, and sometime in the early afternoon checked my e-mail to discover... that the mass spec was broken today anyway, so I didn't even lose any lab time, and saved at least a 3-hour round trip on public transport.
WHICH MEANS: I should update you all on The DPD Saga before going to bed.
We awoke on Saturday morning, and grumbled our way out of bed. We made it to the DPD depot. I rang the intercom on the gate. "I'm here to pick up a parcel," I said. "Did you book a collection slot?" "Yes," I said, "for yesterday evening. You gave me someone else's parcel." "... um," they said, and buzzed me in. (And then A squawked mildly indignantly from the gate behind me; "are you with [them]?" he was asked. "Yes," he squawked, clutching the oversize cardboard box in which someone else's Nintendo Switch had been shipped to me, and was grudgingly permitted entry.)
There proceeded A Farce, beginning with the part where they ripped the address label that had resulted in me erroneously being given the parcel off it, balled it up, and asked me for the tracking number. Inside a warehouse. That was a Faraday cage.
There was then, after much confusion and a non-trivial delay, some escalation. "It's been loaded on the trailer for redelivery on Monday," they said. "We can't get it back off," they said. "That's not acceptable," I said, and Settled In For A Wait.
(Somewhere in here we accidentally made the acquaintance of the dude ahead of us in the queue, who was having a not-quite-as-bad-but-still-pretty-bad day; an Obvious Metalhead Type, all black and long ginger beard, who responded to my thank-you-for-making-my-day-by-casually-talking-about-your-genderqueer-fiend by enthusiastically recommending the wrestling fandom to us. "Oh, we know a bunch of people down Croydon way who are in that fandom!" ... yes, of course the social overlap in the DPD depot in Enfield was the Croydon wrestling fandom.)
Eventually a manager emerged, asked me to actually give him the details again because he suspected they might have got garbled. He proceeded to explain that it might not be possible to get the item back off the trailer, because there's a couple of thousand parcels loaded up and if it's buried it's buried, and what would I like to happen next if that is the case? So I smiled nicely and reiterated that I wasn't cross with any of them personally but I would want a number I could actually talk to a human at in order to make a complaint, and he nodded, and reiterated that they'd have a go but no promises.
... and reemerged from round the back another 15 minutes or so later with the parcel (which, naturally, I then opened on the spot to check it was really correct this time), which saved me from having to dig in my heels about how they clearly, actually, had the capacity to both load and unload trailers, and they could just go ahead and do that, thanks.
Most of A's flying 34-hour visit back to London was thus eaten up wrangling DPD, wrangling the resulting wheelchair parts (successfully), and packing, but we did also do a Date Activity we booked lo these many months ago long before we had any idea that Belfast was going to Happen, being specifically Glow Wild at Wakehurst -- an illuminated sculpture/lantern trail in grounds owned by the National Trust but used and managed by Kew. I was telling A fondly, on our way around it, about my year 6 art project that involved making lanterns from willow and paper, so I was delighted by the sign toward the end explaining that over 200 primary school pupils had been involved.
The lanterns were divided into two approximate groups: one set of abstract or geometric solid-colour lanterns strung in trees (some exciting rounded octahedra in various colours; some more like Physalis alkekengi) and FIGURATIVE WILDLIFE. (There was also a grove of moon-and-stars with beautiful architectural willow frameworks silhouetted against their skins, but that appeared to be thematically disjoint from everything else, or perhaps more accurately at least as thematically disjunct as the ten-foot-long floating sky koi, if less disjunct than the ???Weeping Angels???.)
The exciting wildlife started with OWLS and continued largely on a theme of birds (robins! swallows! a heron! a bluetit! a green woodpecker! probably-a-chaffinch!), with BONUS HEDGEHOG AND FOX AND BADGERS. The badgers were wonderful and A Friend and I was delighted by them; A very indulgently took some photos for me, and I provide two here to give you a bit of a sense of being Personally Judged by a Passel of Glowing Badgers.
And with that: A collected the keys for the Belfast Penthouse this morning, established that most of the unopened post dating back over a year was for Game of Thrones cast and crew who really don't care and have long since moved out, and I bid you goodnight.
So I e-mailed in! And spent the morning feeling groggy and miserable on the sofa, and sometime in the early afternoon checked my e-mail to discover... that the mass spec was broken today anyway, so I didn't even lose any lab time, and saved at least a 3-hour round trip on public transport.
WHICH MEANS: I should update you all on The DPD Saga before going to bed.
We awoke on Saturday morning, and grumbled our way out of bed. We made it to the DPD depot. I rang the intercom on the gate. "I'm here to pick up a parcel," I said. "Did you book a collection slot?" "Yes," I said, "for yesterday evening. You gave me someone else's parcel." "... um," they said, and buzzed me in. (And then A squawked mildly indignantly from the gate behind me; "are you with [them]?" he was asked. "Yes," he squawked, clutching the oversize cardboard box in which someone else's Nintendo Switch had been shipped to me, and was grudgingly permitted entry.)
There proceeded A Farce, beginning with the part where they ripped the address label that had resulted in me erroneously being given the parcel off it, balled it up, and asked me for the tracking number. Inside a warehouse. That was a Faraday cage.
There was then, after much confusion and a non-trivial delay, some escalation. "It's been loaded on the trailer for redelivery on Monday," they said. "We can't get it back off," they said. "That's not acceptable," I said, and Settled In For A Wait.
(Somewhere in here we accidentally made the acquaintance of the dude ahead of us in the queue, who was having a not-quite-as-bad-but-still-pretty-bad day; an Obvious Metalhead Type, all black and long ginger beard, who responded to my thank-you-for-making-my-day-by-casually-talking-about-your-genderqueer-fiend by enthusiastically recommending the wrestling fandom to us. "Oh, we know a bunch of people down Croydon way who are in that fandom!" ... yes, of course the social overlap in the DPD depot in Enfield was the Croydon wrestling fandom.)
Eventually a manager emerged, asked me to actually give him the details again because he suspected they might have got garbled. He proceeded to explain that it might not be possible to get the item back off the trailer, because there's a couple of thousand parcels loaded up and if it's buried it's buried, and what would I like to happen next if that is the case? So I smiled nicely and reiterated that I wasn't cross with any of them personally but I would want a number I could actually talk to a human at in order to make a complaint, and he nodded, and reiterated that they'd have a go but no promises.
... and reemerged from round the back another 15 minutes or so later with the parcel (which, naturally, I then opened on the spot to check it was really correct this time), which saved me from having to dig in my heels about how they clearly, actually, had the capacity to both load and unload trailers, and they could just go ahead and do that, thanks.
Most of A's flying 34-hour visit back to London was thus eaten up wrangling DPD, wrangling the resulting wheelchair parts (successfully), and packing, but we did also do a Date Activity we booked lo these many months ago long before we had any idea that Belfast was going to Happen, being specifically Glow Wild at Wakehurst -- an illuminated sculpture/lantern trail in grounds owned by the National Trust but used and managed by Kew. I was telling A fondly, on our way around it, about my year 6 art project that involved making lanterns from willow and paper, so I was delighted by the sign toward the end explaining that over 200 primary school pupils had been involved.
The lanterns were divided into two approximate groups: one set of abstract or geometric solid-colour lanterns strung in trees (some exciting rounded octahedra in various colours; some more like Physalis alkekengi) and FIGURATIVE WILDLIFE. (There was also a grove of moon-and-stars with beautiful architectural willow frameworks silhouetted against their skins, but that appeared to be thematically disjoint from everything else, or perhaps more accurately at least as thematically disjunct as the ten-foot-long floating sky koi, if less disjunct than the ???Weeping Angels???.)
The exciting wildlife started with OWLS and continued largely on a theme of birds (robins! swallows! a heron! a bluetit! a green woodpecker! probably-a-chaffinch!), with BONUS HEDGEHOG AND FOX AND BADGERS. The badgers were wonderful and A Friend and I was delighted by them; A very indulgently took some photos for me, and I provide two here to give you a bit of a sense of being Personally Judged by a Passel of Glowing Badgers.
And with that: A collected the keys for the Belfast Penthouse this morning, established that most of the unopened post dating back over a year was for Game of Thrones cast and crew who really don't care and have long since moved out, and I bid you goodnight.