Thursday December 30th 2010 – Doldrums...

I woke up feeling quite flat this morning. I’ve heard that these days between Christmas and New Year are referred to as the doldrums, so perhaps this is a factor. Maybe feeling fat, grumpy and hung-over is a traditional pathway into the New Year, but it’s not ideal.

Anyway, I wasn’t going to be bogged down in a mass post-festive lull. No ‘ho-ho-ho’ turned ‘boo hoo’ in my house. I was determined to cling onto that feeling of peace and good will. I’d just wanted to see how far it would carry me through into 2011.

So I plodded on with work, crashing and bashing my way through tedious access issues. All the while I remembered my brightest and most annoying mantra, ‘Oh well, it’ll all be alright in the end.’  

It might be daft, but it was surprisingly effective. By the time I received the courtesy call from The Big Ugly, the doldrums had been overcome and I was awash with sunny goodness. The Big Ugly were calling to confirm tomorrow’s appointment. Our connection has been alright for a little while and somewhere in my head I started seeing two scenes, played through Vaseline lenses.

In the first, there’s a frail old lady who’s been looking forward to talking on Skype with her son and his family in Brisbane. It would be the first time she’d see baby Olivia. If only she could get an engineer to fix her broken internet connection.

In the second, a Tiny Tim-like boy pleads with his father not to work too late on New Year’s Eve, ‘But I’ve got to go 300 miles to help someone who’s already got connection, son. That’s just the way things are round here, I’m afraid.’

Yes, of course I cancelled the appointment, in the hope of bringing a little joy to somebody somewhere. Also, I didn’t really want a Big Ugly Engineer traipsing in here, insulting Bernard and ‘fixing’ anything that wasn’t currently broken.

That’s all we can work with I suppose, that which is current, the present. At 10:30am I happily cancelled The Big Ugly Engineer and it seemed like a very good idea indeed.

Actually, in this present it seems like a very bad idea indeed. It’s 8:15pm and the internet connection has died. Oh, I’m sorry! To be precise, we have connection but no throughput...