Reading etc.

The Irish Times delivers its newspaper to your door on Saturday morning if you pay €1 extra per paper for the privilege. I decided to give Mr. Waffle a subscription to Saturday’s Irish Times for Christmas. Like all the best presents, there was something in it for me also.

The first Saturday of the year was January 1. Did the Irish Times come? No, it did not. During the week, I called. Although I had experienced no difficulty in requesting and paying for my subscription, no one was available to answer my call about actually receiving it. They said that they would call me back, if I left a message. I left a message. Did they call me back? No, they did not.

The second Saturday of the year was January 8. Did the Irish Times come? No, it did not. I had thought that New Year’s day might have been an aberration. Clearly not. I emailed on Saturday, January 8, politely but firmly asking where my paper might be. On Wednesday, which I think you will agree, is not immediately, I received the following reply:

Hi Anne,

Sorry for the delay getting back to you and for the missed delivery last
Saturday. Our driver had some difficulty locating your address.

I have now found it on google maps and will pass directions to him. He
will make sure that your delivery is made next Saturday and each
Saturday after that. I have credited your account for these 2 days. This
will add 2 additional deliveries onto your subscription when it is
expires.

Please give me a call if there are any further problems.

Thanks

Does it strike you that someone might have looked at Google maps at some point after 17 December when they took the money from my account and before January 12 by which point they had missed two deliveries? Never mind, we soldier on. My constant harping about this has come to the attention of the children and now every time we pass blameless Evening Herald vendors on the street, Michael asks, “Is that the man who took your money and didn’t give you your paper?”

The third Saturday of the year was January 16. Did the Irish Times come? No, it did not. I have sent an email to my contact. I await hearing.

In the interim, I might advise strongly against going for the Irish Times delivery service which at €1 a pop is expensive and, worse, doesn’t appear to actually deliver the promised service. And it’s not as though I didn’t already have many reasons to hate the Irish Times.

To read the pile of books beside my bed:

Almost all of the tomes are improving. There are many worthy presents (I did not buy “Great Irish Lives” myself), a few bookclub books I still haven’t finished (“33 Moments of Happiness”, I have been looking at you since 1998) and things I found in the bargain basement in Hodges Figgis that I knew, even at the time of purchase, were going to prove challenging (“Ladysmith”, really, why?).

I aim to polish them all off. Except for “Map of the Nation” which is Mr. Waffle’s and I am not going to read it, I know my limitations. And Saki, Father Brown and Myles are what I read at night when I have nothing else on and they are going to stay there forever but everything else is fair game.

“One Day” by David Nicholls

Not as good as “Starter for Ten”.

“A Hatful of Sky” by Terry Pratchett

Unchallenging. Readable children’s fiction by the man who brought you Discworld.

“Freedom” by Jonathan Franzen

I did not like “The Corrections” very much but I was surprised to find myself really liking this. And there’s nothing like really enjoying a book about middle class middle aged angst and realising that it runs to over 500 pages. Do they not have editors in North America?

1970s – That tennis game where you moved a cursor up and down to bounce a tennis ball to your opponent at very low speeds. Also, my cousins’ very exciting video recorder. You could make people go backwards. At speed.
1980s – A pointless course on COBAL in school. My sister’s acquisition of an Apple MAC.
1990 – My first job. The partner with a computer the size of a house on his desk who the other partners all laughed at. The phone that needed its own suitcase when you lugged it on business trips.
1993 – Traineeship in a large organisation. We had some kind of convoluted internal email. All of our usernames consisted of first four letters of surname followed by first two letters of first name. This led to some amusing nicknames. Look, we were trainees.
1995 – Real email in a real job. Windows 95 – Where do you want to go today?
1997 – The boyfriend who said that his Finnish ex-girlfriend said that everyone in Finland has a mobile phone. Complete refusal to believe this was so.
1998 – Become aware of internet shopping and the intranet is hot.
2000 – Marvellous new search engine called hotbot.
2001 – Online travel booking. Put directions to my wedding and other stuff on a website (arranged by technically gifted brother-in-law). Feel like the bees knees.
2002 – First googled, I think. Apparently, Arthur C. Clarke said that trying to get information from the internet was like trying to get a cup of water from a waterfall. He meant before Google.
2003 – Buy a computer for home use. Set up blog. Buy a digital camera.
2004 – Discovered the joys of RSS, I think.
2005 – Joined Flickr.
2006 – Joined Youtube.
2006 – Got my own domain name as my blogging host sinks beneath the waves.
2007 – Joined Facebook.
2007 – Joined Twitter. Gmail, maybe.
2008, 2009, 2010 – Nothing that I can think of. I may be getting old or else I don’t notice the new things any more.

Do you remember when you first googled?