A little stressed....

...following on from this morning's update on J in China, when I was out at lunch today my phone beeped with a text:

'Driving back to the hotel after another dodgy meal in the middle of nowhere with factory owners who tried to get me pissed on about sixteen bottles of beer. Must be weak as I am now in a people carrier with pissed chinese listening to celine dion at full blast. Surreal to say the least. Jx.'

I hesitated before texting back, 'So who is driving?'

I guess J's text must have been delayed in delivery, for the reply I got was:

'The not pissed chinese. I'm in bed now. I'm fine. x'

So he knows to put his mother's mind at rest!!!!

I got into work to find the internet not working. Nothing. Tried on and off all day. This is in addition to dealing with families' problems, which are time consuming and demanded a lot of time on the phone trying to help sort them: trying to do my admin's job, as she has been off for three weeks now, and being a small charity, there is no IT department....

Eventually I rang W*n*doo, our service provider, and you know, the punching in various numbers in order to hold on for ages waiting for an agent not to be busy: when I did eventually get through, she wasn't British..now this is going to sound racist..but the point is, I found it almost impossible to understand her, she couldn't understand me, we both had to say everything at least twice, spell everything..it took forever to get into what the problem was..to cut a long phone call short, she decided the problem was my router needing its settings changing, so she gave me their help line number, and proceeded to give me the new settings information. I wrote down an endless series of codes and numbers and words which she had to repeat, spell, repeat again..while I sat, trying to be calm and polite but with a rage of frustration building inside me, not knowing what the f**ck to do with all I was writing down...

I then rang the router help line, pressed lots of buttons, waited..and it was answered by a very polite guy, again from the other side of the world, and again the game of understanding each other continued..how many times can I say a word, repeat it, spell it....then it was his turn...I found myself saying, 'I'm sorry but I can't understand what you're saying,' which I hated, but I was almost weeping with frustration, I just wanted my f**ing computer to work like it was last night when I left it....

He made me type in lots of things onto the pc, and we got into systems pages, and I thought, we are getting somewhere, until there was a problem with an IP address..then he says, eventually, I have to ring W*n*doo back and get them to register my user name and password cos then I can have an IP address...this was two hours on, and I just said, I'm sorry, I can't do this, I cannot ring W back, I was holding for ages just to get through...' so I thanked him..before I hung up he said (following his script..) 'Is there anything else I can help you with today?' What a stupid f**ing question!!!

Just at that moment one of my trustees called in unexpectedly and I opened the door and practically burst into tears of stress, anger and frustration..I F**ing hate call centres, so called customer service, computers, the internet and all things which are beyond my control!! After blowing a gasket, I felt better, and kindly trustee called up a friendly computer engineer she knows and he is coming in at 9am tomorrow.

Now that's a relief! I'll keep you posted. Sorry about the language, I warned you at the start I was a little stressed....