The Jigsaw Principle

It's been one of those days when weird things happen. Chatted to Vodafone this morning and got my phone upgraded, when out of the blue, the adviser threw in "Hey, you live by a river - bet that makes up for the broadband black hole, eh?"

Whhhat the hell? Turned out that from her office in Doncaster, this 21 year old (Oh yeah, we were sharing information willingly by the end!) had us on a map, knew we were in Merthyr, which is a well known, indeed a notorious broadband slow-zone, and our flat, on a map, was shown by the river that runs alongside it. Oddly, the only way I could trump that - and I have no idea why I felt the need to trump that incidentally, except possibly some macho bullshit thing - not having access to her home location or broadband status - was to give her more extraneous information - in this case about the execration of the building work opposite us. Ha! That...showed her...right?

Later int he afternoon, got a phonecall from a Jefferson sample chapter client. He was chatty and bright and cheerful, and mentioned he'd researched me all over the internet before making the call. He noted I was a member of the choir ("lovely singing", he said), that I was what he called "an outspoken atheist" (side-note - what does that mean? I think people call you an "outspoken" atheist as soon as you...y'know...speak out). He'd done research into my family name (one for my brother - apparently on the 1881 census, we had relatives in Pembrokeshire. Amrothtastic?), and had looked into the places where some of our authors had been published.

All of which is public domain information, but it was an unnerving conversation to some degree, because I'm not used to people researching me before calling me up to say, as it turned out, thank you for the work I'd done on his chapter.

So all in all, a slightly weird day. In the interests of sharing information with the people who do know me, I should say that I had a day in Starbucks today, editing. Porridge, a sausage sarnie, lots of coffee. When d and I came home, we took a few hours off together, and went to McDonalds. Yes - had fries. Humph. Biked last night, but not tonight. Gonna be an intense weekend though - bits of furniture moving, as come Tuesday, every single one of our windows is being replaced. They say there needs to be a responsible adult here for that. By some odd flaw, I'm going to be here. My pal Philip from New Zealand's over here at the minute, and is coming down for the afternoon. Oddly enough, that just multiplies the problem, and halves the adult quotient a second time.

Ah well - tonight appears to have been a Disappearing write-off, So we get up in the morning and we start again.