Community > General chatter
Setsuna's crazy adventures - a cataloguing
Amazing_Grace:
Well, best of luck to you. Let me know if you need any help with finances or anything like that; I'd be happy to help as best I can.
In any case, I remember you were writing a book at one point. How did that end up going for you?
Setsuna:
Life got in the way. I want to get around to writing more, but I need all of this stuff cleared up first.
(I've got about 30 minutes every couple of days to connect, so I can do admin work and collect email and try to keep the place running)
Now for more 'Things that aren't supposed to happen in a normal world'
Since you are all aware of the fact the place I was in got massively fire damaged, there's a lot of cleanup that happens in regard to closing utility accounts, and the like.
In this case, since the cause of the fire was electrical (from ground floor) the electrical meter reader that checks how much electricity you used was ripped out and can't do the normal readings for billing.
So they had to close the account somehow (You can't use an estimate) and they can't just wait nine months + to see if they can somehow get the figures out of a damaged meter.
They decided to do this by declaring the last paid final bill the end date, which was the 14th June, which was the previous bill (and was paid promptly), because discounts are offered for prompt payment.
Now that's fine, but there's a bit of a laugh to be had.
From the bill:
Due date
Payment not required
Total amount if paid after due date
$0.00
Total amount with discount if paid by due date
$42.52Cr
Basically their accounting system decided to pay out the discount twice, and how do I pay a 0.00 AFTER the due date, anyway?
Of course a human reading over the system would go 'There's no credit to be had' and it IS a final account, so no point either way, and I technically get away scot free from a ~450 dollar electricity bill that SHOULD be owing if the place didn't go down in flames. Of course, this affair has cost me a lot anyway, so it's not really much of a consolation.
But not everything is always terrible. It's mostly the fact people tell me that the world isn't supposed to be this crazy. I beg to differ.
Setsuna:
In the ongoing saga of settling back in, you learn something new.
At the new place, there's this electric cooker. The coils are downright terrible, so it takes a long time to cook anything.
Now, I'm not going to replace it anytime THAT soon (money and all) but making sure you can cook things properly is probably a good idea. Besides, I do things like stir frying and pressure cooking. So a portable gas stove seems like a good idea, you know doing asian cooking (and doing non terrible cooking in general) since the stove here is so lackluster.
So I rock up to a store that sells gas stoves and the like, including portable ones, and ask about them. After all, at least five of the places I inspected before this one used such a setup.
After a ongoing conversation, I find out that by law in Australia, we're not allowed to actually use gas to cook in an apartment. Apparently there have been enough explosions to pass a law against them. It's apparently legal in Europe and Asia, and is why a lot of asian families ignore this law.
More interestingly, the presence of a LPG canister inside an apartment will immediately deny you any insurance claim. Apparently this is listed as a clause in most insurance policies online.
It's one of those little interesting things you learn in a day.
Setsuna:
So I'm finally slowing down, and apart from a few laughs along the way, it seems I might see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Or maybe that's an incoming train, and I need to find somewhere to hide, rather quickly.
First things first, more oddities at my end.
The first is that I've now been given a mobile smart phone for use while I'm here. It's a HTC One (I think) with a custom OS. I couldn't tell you all the details, because to be honest, mobile devices aren't my strong point (I tend to work on bigger devices anyway) although I'm fairly sure this particular one is the strangest phone I've seen in a while.
Apparently it takes all the settings for the various things I tell it to do as suggestions. Most of them I might add are focused around tethering and wifi hotspots, but it sometimes does it while quickly webbrowsing on the phone.
No, I'm serious. Sometimes to tell it to tether, I'd have to turn the mobile data option off, the wifi off and the hotspot option off to get hotspot tethering to work.
This is of course coupled with a unique handicap at my end - due to how my right hand is now geared, sometimes the touchscreen will simply not work. This isn't a problem specific to the phone (I have a Apple 3GS which won't tether at all, since apparently the USB doesn't want to work, there's no wifi option, and the bluetooth version's broken) but due to the fact that as a side effect to the surgery I had a couple of years ago (see cancer removal), I don't generate enough resistance with my right hand for the touchscreen to work depending how I hold the phone.
(There's a nice long scientific explanation, but the short of it is that my thumb, index finger and middle fingers on my right hand have such a low resistance that the touchscreen has a 50/50 to not actually detect the change in resistance. Yes, this also means I'm incredibly susceptible to static electricity to the point where very small shocks can really, really hurt. I also suspect that any minor electrical shock in just the right way will outright kill me.)
Given all the above, I've yet to really see any actual benefit in a mobile phone, but that's because how it works and how I work don't match each other at all. It's probably not necessarily extendable to anyone else. So tethering it is, if only the phone would take the settings as more than something I'm kindly requesting.
Then there's the little question of 'So how does 900 dollars get earmarked as missing without you knowing where the money went, anyway?'
My account has also decided not to work properly, by saying I have stupid amounts of money, but an available balance of maybe 10% that.
This would be normal except for one thing...
The bank can't tell me anything about the earmarked expenses apart from the fact they exist, and I don't own the money. They're as confused as I am about the charges, because they're literal blank entries.
That would be good news, except the money going in is ALSO literal blank entries, so basically money I never had has entered the account, then decided to leave the same way.
Setsuna:
Not that I expect anyone to be reading this, but well, time for another episode of 'How can things go uniquely wrong for one person?'
Well, during the last week, I've been arranging for repairs that we first noted when we inspected the place.
One of the repairs wasn't really that big a deal (Shower divider misaligned and won't run on rail), another required fixing a window that was used to break in (a big deal but I've been home all the time so I've kept an eye on the window), a power point that jammed, and a faulty light in my room (not dangerous, but have to be done by an electrician in Australia) and the last was two wooden floorboards that bent in severely when you stepped on them.
We were thinking the boards were damaged, so they ripped up the two boards to take a look.
Termite damage. They had eaten through the floor supports
So what happens?
The problem is that the termites ate their way through somewhere (and we haven't seen the termites, so they'll probably be back if we don't do something about it) and it's now starting to look like a VERY big job.
The only thing going for us is that we didn't do it, so we're not liable for the repair cost.
The bad news is that the damaged floorboards were literally in the MIDDLE of the apartment, so the beam they ate their way through could mean that the entire floor has to be torn up.
... And we just moved into the place. *sigh*
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version