‘Courtesy’ my arse

I don’t know if I’m getting more impatient with age, but I have never experienced such bad customer service as I have in Perth. Maybe it’s because WA works on a completely different level of urgency to the rest of the world, or because the ‘Wait Awhile’ attitude is all people have grown to expect. Whatever the reason, when it comes to getting anything done, it’s bloody irritating.

Restaurants can often take 30 minutes to serve you coffee, and by then it’s stone cold. Or, as happened to me recently, they nuke your apple pie in the microwave and leave you with a burnt oesophagus and large medical bills to repair the damage. In any other country that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen, here the manager just laughed it off and told me I need to be more careful what I eat.

It’s common for telephone companies to try rounding your bills up to whatever prime number springs into their head, and then take months of arguing before they eventually pay the money back. And dare ask a question in a shop, and you can sometimes be made to feel like you’re inconveniencing the assistant.

The latest establishment to have my eyes rolling back in annoyance is the Kia dealership in Wangara.

My Rio – a car which bears a remarkable resemblance to a Dinky toy – is broken again. Having already had new parts fitted back last June to correct a faint knocking noise in the engine, it recently started to do the same thing again. This time the knocking noise was so loud it sounded like something was about to drop out of the engine.

So I drove my sickly car into Kia and asked the head mechanic to come out for a little spin. Of course he had absolutely no idea what the noise was, which, while very predictable, seemed a little odd as they’d already fixed it once before. I was just glad he heard the noise at all. I was fully expecting sods law to intervene and to be left looking like a neurotic woman driver making a fuss about nothing.

Two days later the car was dropped off and I asked to be provided with a replacement car while I was waiting for the repairs to be made. Pretty normal request I would have thought, especially considering the car was only 2-years-old and had its service just the week before.

Sorry, there were no cars available for me to use I was told, Kia don’t cover this in their warranty. Even if the fault is as a result of the rather flimsy design. If I would like I could hire a ‘courtesy car’ from them however, I could pay $33 a day. Plus an additional 25 cents for each km I drove.

Seriously? Since when is it a ‘courtesy car’ if you have to pay for it.

The last time I looked in a dictionary, the word ‘courtesy’ meant to provide something out of generosity -  a polite gesture. Preferably free of charge. The word doesn’t mean to fleece a stranded customer and then, to add insult to injury, try to charge them $13 more than the local car rental company would.

“So how long do you reckon the work is going to take then?” I asked.
“We don’t know” they helpfully replied.

Marvelous. Judging on the last time they tried to fix it, it took nearly 3 weeks. So that would be $630 dollars plus mileage (plus the month’s motor finance payment) out of my pocket, to pay for a car that shouldn’t be broken in the first place.

Surely that can’t be right?

The gear box was eventually taken apart and half-a-dozen new parts ordered from the East coast. I think the parts had to cross the country by train, because obviously the warranty wouldn’t cover anything as costly as DHL.

After waiting several weeks for any news I’ve finally been told the car might actually be ready to collect tomorrow. Although more likely next Tuesday. Or possibly towards the end of that week. Sometime anyway, depending on the mood of the person fitting the parts and whether they need to knock off early each day to watch the footy.

No rush guys, really. We love being left high, dry and car less. It makes life so much more interesting, especially when Mother Nature has a strop on.

uglg

Raining Cats, Dogs and Maltesers

Mother Nature wasn’t very happy yesterday. In fact, I’d go as far as to say she was pretty pissed off. If I was a guy I’d probably say it was a case of PMT, but I’m not, so I’ll just hazard a guess and say she was having one hell of a bad hair day.

Whatever the reason, Ms Nature certainly gave 2 fingers up to anyone in Perth who’s been moaning about the weather. Or more specifically, the 40 degrees of constant heat with not a drop of rain since November.

Now I do appreciate that to people in wetter isles, England lets say, the idea of nearly 5 months without rain might seem like something of a dream. But let me tell you, it’s not. When a total lack of precipitation is teamed up with temperatures more suited to melting iron ore, it can make for some pretty uncomfortable living. Not to mention a rather dry, dusty, brown and monotonous landscape.

So that said, I think it would be quite safe to assume that rather a lot of people in Perth (and some extremely dehydrated plants) were rather looking forward to the dry spell breaking. And break it did. With bells on.

With barely enough time to drag the dog through the fly screen, the blue sunny sky disappeared and the hailstones arrived. Hailstones the size of Maltesers, pouring out of the sky so fast you’d think God had accidently left his freezer door open, and a passing angel had carelessly tipped it over. We were lucky only to get Maltesers, in the city they were apparently the size of golf balls.

Then came the rain. Or should I say the downpour, pelting in at us from at every angle but up. Within minutes our garden was several inches under water, and there was, what could only be described, as a flash flood going past the end of our drive.

Being me, of course I tried to take some photos of the hailstones stacking up 9 inches deep at our back door. But the moment I opened the door to take the picture, the bloody dog shot off into the garden. How stupid is he? He see’s, what to him must have looked like a Noah’s Ark moment, and he still decides to go out for a quick dig in the sand.

Needless to say once he went out I refused to let him, or his soggy wet fur, back in again. He may be of the non-smelling variety of pooches, but even a soaking wet Spoodle has something of a whiff about it. So I hardened my heart and held my resolve – right up until the point where my daughter stood sobbing at the window, looking down at a pathetic excuse for a fur ball, trying to pin himself flat against the wall with his damp ears plastered around his snout. Two clean towels and a vigorous blow dry later and he was back inside and on the rug. I hope he’s learned his lesson, that nothing is worth the pain of a dig in the hail.

Dumb dogs aside, in the sort of weather that heralds the start of Armageddon the average person normally chooses to stay indoors, steer clear of windows and turn up the TV. Sadly I’m not average, so I grabbed the car keys, swam to the car and set off with oars at the ready.

Of course as the sky turned pitch black overhead and the odd branch blew past like tumbleweed, it did cross my mind that this might not be the most sensible decision in the world. But really I had no choice. My son, who isn’t partial to loud noises and the car wash at the best of times, was stranded at his nursery 8 minutes down the road. Even if he’d had the foresight to take his water wings with him that day, I very much doubted he’d have managed the journey alone.

“The clouds are very angry” he told me, over and over all the way home.

My poor husband arrived back quite a bit later than usual that night.  Something to do with me having his car, the train tracks being flooded, every cab being taken and the buses being fit to burst. I’m not sure it necessarily helped, when I pointed out that if he had had his car that day, he’d no doubt still be stuck in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, as the world and their wet dog struggled to leave work.

Needless to say the news teams and anchormen (I would be P.C. and say anchorwoman, but all the women sound like men anyway) were practically salivating with joy on the TV last night. Finally, something worth reporting in Perth that didn’t involve a drunken AFL player, a misplaced kangaroo and a runaway shopping trolley on the freeway.

As I know I’m rather prone to the odd bit of exaggeration (creative license and all), I’ve added the pictures below to show that for once, Perth really did have something happen to get excited about.

lylyl

A bad case of wind

I mentioned in the previous post we’ve been having storms here in Perth, but really the word ‘storm’ doesn’t do it justice. It’s been more like a series of typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes all rolled up into one. Most days it’s wet and windy, and there isn’t a long enough break between the rain to even take the dog to the park. I did try yesterday, but I had to flatten myself around a tree trunk as soon as I got there, and then wait for the horizontal rain to give up and go away.

The stupid thing was I had looked at both my raincoat and umbrella on the way out the door, and decided, that with the sun shining directly above the house and the nearest dangerous looking cloud out on the horizon,  I’d go without. Apparently a rain cloud can cover ground a lot faster than I can.

So this is my 3rd winter in Perth, and without wanting to sound like a whinging Pom, they are definitely getting worse. I don’t know whether it’s global warming that’s causing weather patterns to shift around, but the climate and seasons are refusing to stick to the guidelines. Australian summers are getting hotter and drier, winters are getting windier and wetter, and the Gods of Thunder and Lightening are definitely way out of control.

The first of the big storms came a few weeks ago. A Monday to be precise, the day that my son’s tonsils were due to go under the chopping block. Instead, I was staggering around the house losing my breakfast to gastric flu, my daughter was in bed, busy retching into a bucket and emitting a series of very dramatic moans and groans, and my husband had just flown to Sydney on business.

Setting off to collect my son from nursery, I lowered myself carefully into the car (fast movements are not nausea’s best friend) and went to open the garage door. It went up half way. It came back down again. I pushed the button again. It went up a quarter of the way. It came back down again. Now of course common sense should have told me not to push my luck for a third time. But I did. It was cold, wet, dark and blowing a gale. There wasn’t a chance in hell I was going to walk to the nursery to collect him.

So I pushed the button. Once again it went up half way – and then stopped. This would have been bad enough on its own, but of course I’m not that lucky. A massive gust of wind then swept up the driveway catching the garage door on the way, it snapped it off the rollers and then buckled it in half. The twisted hunk of metal than dropped back down – to within an inch of the cars roof, with me in it.

Now I don’t want to come across as a useless, blubbering woman who falls apart in times of trouble, but this really was the very last straw in an incredibly long day involving a high temperature and a toilet bowl. I did attempt to use my very limited strength to push the door back up to an upright position, but unsurprisingly, the door had other ideas. So with the metal rippling away in the wind next to me, I called a friend and sobbed out my tale of woe.

Lucky for me she saved the day, collecting stranded son and sending round further reinforcements, in the form of her husband who helped me to tether the door up with ropes. That night I laid in bed listening to it banging away and imaging how much damage it would potentially cause if it broke free and took off the roof of the house across the road.

3 weeks on and the storms have returned to try and finish off the garage door, which is still roped up and wedged shut with ladders. Trees in the garden are bending like blades of grass and rubbish bins are flying up and down the street like tumbleweed. I feel like Dorothy, minus the safety blanket of a pair of sparkly red shoes.

So the other night my husband came in from work and shut the door. An hour later the wind picked up and blew it back open again. Every other door in the house slammed shut, the roof hatch disappeared up into the eaves and all of the AC covers in the ceilings went with them. Trying to shut the front door again was the tricky bit.  With a cyclone now picking up pace by the door mat, the front of the house had turned into something of a wind tunnel, and we couldn’t get the hall door open to get out there. I half expected the front of the house to take off into the night sky, leaving us hanging onto a door handle below.

The two off us finally pushed the door open and slammed the front door shut, but not before the length of the hallway was covered in hailstones and the coats on the hall stand had all had a wash.

“And that is why I always lock the door when I shut it” I said.

With no sign of this bad weather letting up anytime soon, you have to wonder whether Mother Nature has a real axe to grind with this part of the world. Perhaps she’s ticked off with some Aussie half wit calling her a Sheila, or maybe she’s just having a shocking case of PMT. Either way, until we lower the excess on our insurance I wish she’d air some of her grievances elsewhere and give our badly built house a break.

Planes, trains and watery accidents

My 2 1/2 year old son has been undergoing toilet training for about 6 weeks now, and I have to say he’s doing a lot better than I ever expected him to. Boys are, after all, meant to be a lot slower on the uptake when it comes to the learning about when to poop and pee, and when to clench and hold.

Of course there have been accidents. One next to the sofa, one in the bedroom where he shut the door on himself and couldn’t get out, and a handful around the bathroom – normally as a result of him misjudging the volume of wee in his bladder and shooting off the potty before he’s completed the job.

Trying to shoo the dog away as I re-dress, empty, bleach and wipe is the hardest part of all.

Unfortunately my sons days at nursery do set him back sometimes. Whether it’s the excitement of finger painting or the 15 or so other kids queuing up for the potty, some days I go to collect him and am met with a bag of wet clothes and a rather nasty smelling teddy. The washing machine never had such a good work out for so few clothes. One day, when he had gotten through all 3 sets of spare clothes in his Bob the Builder backpack, I arrived to find him wafting around the room wearing nothing more than a kimono from the dressing up box. That was one of those occasions when you wish you had a camera to hand.

As with many things in life, thinking about doing something is often worse than actually doing the deed. The very idea of replacing nappies with pants on a leaking child is one such time. I found the only way to really stay one step of the game in the beginning was to spend every 4th minute asking him if he needed to go, and then ferrying him backwards and forwards to the potty, armed with 16 books and a thermos of tea (for me). It was monotonous and repetitive, but it did the trick. After a while, and probably because he got so damn sick of being asked, he started to tell  me when he needed to go. Or rather he’d screech “Poo Mummy” as he scurried towards me, with one hand behind his back clutching his bottom.

Seeing that I would drop everything and leap to attention when he needed to go, he quickly realised that the whole process could be manipulated into something of a game. I’d run to get him to the bathroom, peel off the layers, sit him down and then he’d laugh. “No Poo Mummy”. Hmmmmm. That one soon wears very thin, particularly when you’re in the shower, eating your breakfast or halfway up a mountain..

A Blue Mountain to be exact. Let me explain.

We’ve just got back from spending a week in Sydney. A week in Sydney in the rain. Who knew it would be so cold, or so wet at this time of year. Everyone but us apparently. Typically, the weather forecast for the week changed upon our arrival. It went from sun and a spot of cloud every day, to rain with a touch of rain every day.

Damp weather aside, holidaying with children is always a test – a test of a parent’s patience, stamina and will to live. Air travel in particular can be stressful at the best of times (something I wrote about before),  but throw in a couple of kids and several tonnes of ‘can’t get by without you’ luggage and you can find yourself half way to a nervous breakdown at 30,000 feet.

It’s always hard to know how your children will react to leaving the ground in a vacuum packed can. My son wasn’t amused. At all. Watching the aeroplanes through the terminal window – great fun. Walking down the air-slip onto the plane – not so fun. Sitting in his seat for take off – simply not going to happen.

So what does he call out in a desperate bid for freedom? “Poo Mummy”.

Yes, just what all the passengers around us wanted to hear. I’m sure some actually recoiled and held their nose in fear. So, with the fasten seat belt sign lit up and the plane doors already closed, he was whisked up the aisle to the toilet with potty in hand. Did he need to go? Of course he didn’t, but it would have been a pretty brave parent to take the risk.

And so followed a week of untimely potty stops. In the bushes in front of the Opera House. In the undergrowth next to the museum. Sat inside the land train going around Darling Harbour. Behind the seal enclosure at Taronga zoo. On a grassy knoll overlooking Botany Bay. On the train into the shops, and around the back of the Police Station in the CBD. There was no where he didn’t go. And there was no where we could go without a potty, wet wipes and spare clothes at the ready. It really is amazing how the bowels of a small child can shape and dictate your day.

The mountains, as previously discussed, were probably the worst. When he decided he needed to go, the rain was coming in at us diagonally from both sides – with the force of Niagara Falls. We happened to be out on a nature trail at that moment, trying to take at least one photo of the view to prove we had enjoyed the grey and misty scenery. We ended up in the car pack, huddled over him with umbrellas, as he sat on the ground to give it a go. Did anything materialise?  Nope, not even with the encouraging sound of gushing water hitting his parent’s heads.

Same story in the Jenolan caves, and then twice on the way back up the mountain at night, in thick and surprisingly spooky fog. At times like this it is definitely tempting to ignore the little voice from the back seat, but the car seat was hired and the excess for damage to the car was $3000. No pee is worth that much. This time he sat perched on his potty in the boot of the car, smiling up at us, as if it were all perfectly normal.

All pit stops aside, the biggest and most costly accident that occurred during the week, was not by my toddler, but by my husband instead. We were on the ferry traveling from Circular Quay to Darling Harbour, and had decided to sit outside in the spitting rain, to take some pictures of the Opera House as we went past.

Somehow, and don’t ask me how, the camera leaped out of his pocket, dropped onto the ferry floor and slid 2 foot across to the edge of the boat. As it happened (does it ever happen any other way?), there was a gap in the side of the boat. About, oh lets say, camera sized in width. The only bloody hole, I might add, that there was down our side of the boat.

The camera then proceeded to slide through the hole and sit on the outside rim. I’m sure the camera lenses winked at me. We both looked at it in disbelief – I know I was certainly wondering what the hell is it doing down there. Having a child on my lap I couldn’t move. My husband, who swears it all happened in seconds, apparently has the reaction times of a snail on speed.

PLOP, over it went. All of our photos sank right to the bottom of the harbour. I’m not embarrassed to say I burst into tears. My husband did what any intelligent man in the same situation should do. He kept very quiet and looked at the floor. After several minutes of watching my tears mixing with the rain, my daughter helpfully piped up.

“Now you’ve lost all of my photos.” Followed by. “This wouldn’t have happened if we’d sat inside you know.” I believe she received quite a glare.

We all left the ferry in silence. Even my son knew better than to say he needed a poo. Half an hour later, when we were standing underneath the sharks inside the aquarium, my husband ventured to speak to me. “Well obviously we’ll buy a new camera tomorrow.”

And so we did.

He did feel marginally better when told in the camera shop that he was the 3rd person that week to drop their camera into the water. Had our home contents insurance actually covered us for the camera outside of the house, then he might have redeemed himself a little more. But of course, despite trotting along to the Police Station to report it’s loss (hence the potty stop), it didn’t. Now had he dropped it into a mug of tea at home, we’d be quids in – go figure.

The new camera is shatterproof, waterproof, snow-proof and husband-proof. That of course means it comes with a manual thick enough to sit on at the breakfast bar. By the next holiday I might just have worked out which setting goes with which, and how to use the ‘Beauty Mode’. Till then, it’s safe to say my dearest husband will be remaining on the other side of the lens, and paying for his act of clumsiness through the public humiliation on this blog.

ii

: : : : : : : : : : :

Choice isn’t always a good thing

It is an accepted fact these days that our everyday decisions are now dictated to and in many ways controlled by marketing companies and the hypnotic hold they seem to have over us. Through the power of media they relentlessly bombard us, telling us how we should be living our life, what we want to look like, how we should feel, what we need to eat and when we should be rushing out and spending money we haven’t got. These marketing gurus also seem to have the ability to take an everyday mole hill of a decision for us and turn it into a mountain of dilemma.

Take this morning for example. I went out looking to buy some toothpaste and came back needing half an hour in a darkened room and a packet of Panadol. Had I known beforehand that buying a simple tube of toothpaste was going to be such a challenging lesson in choice and decision making, then perhaps I would have left the house a good 15 minutes earlier and taken along a friend for moral support.

On the surface it might seem like a fairly straightforward mission to accomplish.  A matter of reaching out and grabbing the same one I had used that morning, a whole 60 minutes ago. But ‘simple’ is never something that translates easily from theory into practice. Don’t ask me how, but somewhere between the bathroom sink and the shop floor my memory had somehow erased all memories of which one I normally use.

Incidentally I blame this short term memory loss entirely on having children and as a direct result of all the brain cells that have died due to years of lost sleep.

Anyway, as a consequence of my brain blowing a fuse in this manner, I was now faced with what can only be described as a bank of cardboard boxes, and a terrible case of indecisiveness starting to grow. As someone who has trouble choosing between a blueberry muffin and a chocolate muffin without first checking what my husband is having, this didn’t bode well for my walking out of that shop anytime soon.

This may seem like something of a dramatic exaggeration (something I admit we writers are prone to do from time to time), but this time I kid you not. Stretched out from one end of the aisle all the way down to the shower gel there were no less than 24 different types of toothpaste on display, and this by the way, was ONLY in the Colgate section.

I ask you, 24. Is that really necessary?

All I want from my toothpaste is something to make my teeth shiny and bright enough to stop traffic and to give me breathe as fresh as a packet of Polo’s. What I don’t want is to have to stand there trying to narrow down the choice and make an informed decision about something so incredibly mundane.

Of course I know that when it comes to sales it is purely about the figures and making even more money for Mr Colgate. But please, can’t they take pity on those of us who simply don’t have a spare 15 minutes to scan the packets back and forth and wonder whether we need the Colgate Maximum Cavity Protection Blue Minty Gel, the Colgate Advanced Whitening plus Tartar Control, the Colgate Max White or the Colgate Triple Action..

What does ‘triple action’ even mean? Will it swill your mouth out for you and wipe down the wash basin afterward? If it did they should just say so. The stuff would fly off the shelves and into the homes of anyone who has a child who goes to brush their teeth and leaves a rim of dried on toothpaste scum in their wake.

So here’s what I want to know. If toothpaste is a health and hygiene product and something that we should use at least twice a day, then why does the whole industry have to be turned into such a marketing companies dream and a buyers nightmare. Why can’t they just make ONE toothpaste that does the lot. Toothpaste at the end of the day is just toothpaste and I find it very hard to believe that the ingredients in each of the 24 different types that Colgate produces can vary so much as to warrant a different name, packaging and price tag.

This overwhelming choice aside, what no doubt has that Tooth Fairy shaking her head in horror is the effect that some of these toothpaste can have on your teeth.

For years I have been coveting the Hollywood smile and buying anything with ‘Whitening’ on the box. Are my teeth any whiter for it? Of course they aren’t. Instead they are now so sensitive that eating an ice cream on a windy day can be something of a challenge. I am also forced into the ’Sensitive’ toothpaste section, one that funnily enough comes at twice the price for half the tube. If I was that way inclined I’d say there was a definite whiff of a conspiracy to be had here. Much the same as if Benson & Hedges sold you cigarettes for years and then charged you double the price again for a new set of lungs.

Of course I am without a doubt the gullible mug for believing what I read on the packet, especially given what I do for a living. My common sense tells me that the promise of gain always results in some sort of pain. But it does make you wonder how safe on our teeth are these Whitening toothpastes over many years of constant brushing abuse?

Are there cages of guinea pigs stowed away somewhere with perfect smiles, but with teeth too brittle to bite through a sunflower seed?

Amongst the many offerings from Colgate there is even the ever so temptingly titled Baking Soda & Peroxide toothpaste. Can that really be safe? While baking soda is great for clearing out blocked drains and peroxide handy if your highlights are growing out, when it comes to teeth they both sound harsh enough to strip off all the enamel from a 100 paces.

Last year 3 brands of Chinese toothpaste, Tri Leaf Spearmint, Cool Mate and Heibeing were banned when they were found to have contained potentially lethal levels of a toxic chemical called DEG (diethylene glycol). This is an industrial solvent used in paint and anti freeze and can cause kidney and liver damage. Counterfeit Colgate toothpaste also turned up in the US last year, containing the same dangerous chemicals.

It’s enough to make you wonder what other hidden ingredients you are swilling around your mouth. Are we that generation of human guinea pigs so swayed by clever advertising and slick marketing that we are willing to use anything if it sounds to good to be true? And if so, which parts of our bodies will be turning green and dropping off in years to come?