A near death and a thank you

My Saturday morning had begun so perfectly. I woke up to sunshine and feelin’ groovy, my current wakeup tune on my Blackberry.

Slow down, you move too fast
You gotta make the morning last
Just kickin’ down the cobblestones
Lookin’ for fun and
Feelin’ groovy

Shows my age, I suppose, but I assure you that I was very, very young then. (If you want to wake up like me, you can download the sound file here.)

Lazy breakfast with my cats, answering a few clients’ e-mails, then off into town, still feelin’ groovy. I won’t tell you about the crowd in the supermarket, it will only make you feel depressed.

When I got back, I saw that the bicycle floor pump that I had ordered had arrived in the post. I went to try it out – and it did not work. You see, you are supposed to flip a lever up, push the hose onto the valve, flip the lever down. The fancy clip-on connector refused point blank to connect to the valve.

Saturday is my day off.
“You are a bicycle pump, for goodness’ sake.”
And that means that I have no rights, I suppose.

I guess the pump has a point. Besides, you cannot expect to have runaway love affairs all the time with everyone and everything.

On the phone to the supplier, who thought that I was very strange.

“What type of valve do you have on your bike?”
“What?”
“What type of valve?”
How am I supposed to know?
“Never mind that. It just won’t go on!”
“Pull the valve out as far as it will go and then push it to the side, then it can’t go back into the tyre”, was the advice along with one “aha” and two “hm”.

Just in case you are curious, I did ponder the point whether it should be two “hm” or two “hms” and decided that “hms”, although technically correct, just did not look good.

I am not useless when it comes to technical and technological problem solving. I am quite good, actually, with these things. I just hate everything fiddly. I found out an hour later that the lever has to be flipped down first and then up, not the other way round. The way they make these things nowadays is just not logical.

I think it was not so much a matter of being possessed as pushing the wrong button when I downloaded an update to a Blackberry app that can read MS Office documents.

I am not going to do this update, you’ll have to try another time, said my Blackberry. We have a good relationship, my Blackberry and I, but sometimes he is plain stubborn. I was not overly alarmed because I never wanted the update in the first place. The version I had worked perfectly well.

No amount of TLC would nurse my Blackberry back to life. I decided that I would bury him in the garden by those pretty yellow flowers.

It was then that I heard a quiet sigh and noticed with something that resembled a panic attack (mine) that the life was going out of my Blackberry fast as it was nestling in my hand. I think I heard a faint good-bye but cannot be absolutely sure about it. There was the odd flicker and the occasional shake of a limb but overall, I concluded, he was on his way out. No amount of TLC would nurse him back to life.

Poor thing, he was still so young, his promising life so brutally cut short. Only yesterday afternoon we had been out cycling together. He looked so tiny in death. I decided that I would bury him in the garden by those pretty yellow flowers.

On the phone to Vodafone.

“Are you German?” the brunette with the dark eyes and long eyelashes asked, playing her exotic voice like a flute.
“No, why?”

She has a friend with the same first name as mine and he is German.

I once had a conversation at Budapest airport with somebody, who thought that I was Dutch.
“No, I am not Dutch, I am …”
“Are you sure?”

How do I know that the voice from Vodafone belongs to a brunette with the described attributes? I just know, trust me. For a brief moment I considered asking her out to dinner but she could probably not get a flight to here at such short notice. Some things are just now worth the hassle.

Then the unexpected happened: “I will arrange for a replacement of your device to be sent to you immediately”, she fluted in my ear.
“Groovy!”

I could tell that she was pleased. And all that because of her friend, who had stolen my first name.

Thank you, Vodafone, thank you. This is much, much better than expected customer service.

I thought that I should mention and acknowledge it publicly, especially after my post of the other day.

Later the same day I connected my dead Blackberry to my computer. There is a little programme that the nice people at RIM (is it RIM?) give you, which allows you to do a colourful variety of unspeakable things with your Blackberry.

I only wanted to see if I could salvage any information and discovered a function, which allowed me to install and delete all sorts of things on my Blackberry through my computer.

So I deleted and installed all sorts of things and for the second time in the same day, the unexpected happened. Gingerly, my Blackberry opened an eye, flashed his display at me, yawned so heartily it would make a cat jealous and had a good stretch.

I don’t know what came over me just now, I must have fallen asleep … are you okay? You look pale.

I told you I was not bad with technology.

You might also like: