Where we try to do everything at once
Oh how silly we were to think all our plans and preparations would mean we could do everything at once and it would run smoothly.
According to our list of things to do we were going to purchase a cute little one bedroom house with a large deck and a leaf-shedding tree on the Central Coast, pack up and move all our belongings to that cute little one bedroom house, and get super fast broadband channeled to our laptops under that leaf-shedding tree. In the mean time I was going to write an assignment on the status of customary law within various legal systems and email it the day of our move. And in the end we were going to sit on our new deck, drink champagne, and Skype my Mum and Dad for tips on how to keep the leaves under control without lifting a rake.
For a whole week before the settlement/moving date – our bags and boxes had been packed, our notice to the landlord had been given, and the removalists had been booked – the vendor’s bank said we were allowed to buy the house then were not allowed to buy the house at least ten times. After the fifth time I booked a storage unit for our belongings, started looking for temporary accommodation for ourselves, and requested an extension on my assignment.
On Thursday afternoon, the day before we were supposed to settle/move, Eddie phoned me at 3:50pm to say we weren’t going to settle, but our solicitor had organised for us to move into the house under license, so at least we had somewhere to put our stuff and ourselves. Then ten minutes later he rang back to say we couldn’t move in under license. Then ten minutes later he rang back to say we could. If I hadn’t been on the bus I might have cried.
The next morning, our removalists arrived fifteen minutes early at 7:45am, magicked all our belongings into their truck, drove up the coast, unpacked our belongings into our house and were on their way back to Sydney at 1:30pm. They were amazing, so Eddie forgives them for breaking the ruler on his drawing table.
Our solicitor rang that afternoon to say settlement date would be on Monday. We said we didn’t believe him, to one another, but that weekend we put together our bookshelves and filled them with all our books and folders and magazines anyway.
On Sunday night I “slapped together” (Eddie’s words) the rest of my assignment. And I tried not to think about the previous weekend, when during my compulsory tutorial (the one that prevented me, fortuitously I think now, from running my first marathon), one of our tutors gave a rather heartfelt description of how the perfect assignment should flow and balance and end on a deep philosophical point. It sounded lovely, but I’m ashamed to admit I have no idea whether or not my assignment flowed and balanced or had a deep philosophical point at the end. Which means it probably didn’t.
On Monday I handed in my assignment and we settled. And I really did think we’d be back online by Monday too. But, it turns out there’s a good reason for all those TV advertisements telling you to buy your modem and then connect to the Internet.
Today is Friday and it’s been four weeks since I applied for our broadband connection and three weeks since we moved, and in that time our new ISP couldn’t find our telephone line, then they couldn’t find our application, twice, then they forgot to send us a modem, and now we’ve been waiting a week for it to arrive in the post. And I’m sitting in the computer room of the City of Sydney library at Circular Quay updating my blog before I go to work, hoping, like anything, the modem will arrive this morning, but I’m not going to plan my weekend around it.
haha… the same thing happened to me regarding the internet and modem thing. it took them over 4 weeks to send me the modem. we wrote a letter of complaint and got 50 days of free internet or something. i think it’s reasonable… maybe you should complain too
.
Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Time for some soliloquisms(?) or platitudes such as “These things are sent to try us”, “Adversity makes us stronger” . . . an’ all that. Or as Rachel so intuitively says “What a bad buzz”! If you both come through all this . . . errrr, unsettling time intact, well, think how much better prepared you’ll be for your next move. And the next one and so on.
No?
Hey Simon, I feel for you. I havent’ been for this long without the Internet at home since 1999. You’ll be please to hear I’m working on my complaint, which is turning into a novel, now.
Cedric! I’d like to think adversity is making me stronger, but I’m leaning more towards what one of the “customer service” people at iinet said to me the other day when I explained how unhappy I was with their service… “That’s life” apparently. But, we do appreciate your platitudes
You poor thing! I recall vividly the last time we moved house. I said (bitterly and firmly) that it really WOULD be the last time we ever moved. All that backwards and forwards-ing, yes you can, no you can’t… the bank lost the money, which meant a few hours of sheer hell, until it found it again (I believe our money had been whisked away to the stock market to make more money for the bank in the meantime – and we all know now how that went). It was a lot of ultimately pointless and hugely distressing stress. But – finally settling into the house was just about worth it and twelve years down the line we’ve almost finished doing it up the way we wanted…. There may be a philosophical lesson in all this, but I don’t feel confident to find it. Actually I just think the people in the banks and the conveyancing lawyers should all be made to move constantly, so they can feel what it’s like on the receiving end!
Oh no litlove! I don’t know how I would have coped if the bank people had told me they’d lost my money! What is so frustrating about the bank and conveyancing people is their inability to talk like they care after they’ve just told you about the mess they’ve made. And their ability to make you feel like your frustration is unfair to them. I think I would be willing to wait twelve years for our house to be the way we want it if it meant we didn’t have to go through this again. I don’t think I’ll be searching for any philosophical lessons either Lol.