The last time I posted here I’d had a bad day, but it had finished with a smile.  It turns out that there wasn’t much karma around for me though as my week deteriorated and I struggled to find a smile among it all :o(

So here are my lessons of last week:

• If you have a teeny tiny feeling you shouldn’t use a particular ATM, do not ignore it.  It may well accept your card, ask you for your pin number and then shut down.  It could then get stuck in a start up loop so you are not sure what its next move will be.  It will, of course be 2 hours before the helpline number opens and be the only partly working machine in London Bridge.
• When you try to cancel your card, the ‘helpful’ customer assistant (who is clearly not based in the UK as demonstrated by her insistence that she needs ‘the first letter of your initial’) may well refuse to cancel your card until you provide her with ‘the long number across the front of the card’.
• It could take around 7 different ways of explaining that, if you had the ‘the long number across the front of the card’, you would have the card in front of you and would therefore not be trying to cancel it.
• This ‘helpful’ customer assistant may then not be able to tell you if anyone has used you card in the time it’s been un-cancelled in the ATM and will need to pass you to a colleague
• ‘Helpful’ customer assistant number 2 may well be based in the UK but, without the exact date, detail and amount (to the penny) of a recent transaction on your account, will not be able to help you. (‘Regrettably, you have failed the security check’) – nevermind the fact that the last ‘helpful’ customer assistant knows every detail of you including your inside leg measurement.
• The day this happens, you will probably only have 52p in your purse, no petrol in your car and an overdue electricity bill you were going to pay with your card that morning..
• As you leave work after the day from hell, don’t say ‘it can’t get any worse’ because, it could turn out that during a software upgrade that sneaked in while you were at a meeting, something on your laptop has been corrupted and you may have lost e-mail, Word, Excel….the lot really….
• …and after an hour on the phone to the helpdesk in Minnesota, you’ll find that actually it will take 4 hours to fix and can only be done in person (meaning you’ll loose half a day as there are no spare laptops while the fix happens)….grrrrr.

Hey ho, it did eventually start getting better and I did my second Christmas fair on Saturday with poggyW goods, and a lot more.  And that REALLY made me smile.  Sister 2 and I really were rushed off our feet (other than a brief interlude where we drunk mulled wine and danced a little) and we sold out of Pogimals and lavender bags!

So maybe karma does exist after all.  I just hope I don’t have to have such a chaotic week this week – I have a lot of Pogimals to make for the next fair next weekend and I don’t have the time for any more disasters! :o)

The boys had to shut their eyes a lot last week to block out my humphing...