One Daily Positive - Week 33

The summer has raced by, I've achieved so much, but it's coming to an end and before I know it, I'll be back home in Dubai.

Sounds ok some downtime, but my life alternates between super, hyper busy, surrounded by people to just me with nothing to do.

I've opened new Instagram @onedailypositive and Twitter @1dailypositive accounts for my #onedailypositive. I was getting fed up with family and friends commenting on my life, but not to me, word always gets back. Funny how most people have raced over to follow me there #FOMO I think. I used a phone number to set the account up and deselected fb contacts, but it appears as the 2 accounts run off the same phone it means everyone can I see I have a new account. How annoying?

MacBook Air now only works when on charge, full back up done and a new one will be purchased soon.

224 Sunday Said goodbye to Mary and the whirlwind, did the washing, remade the beds, packed for Greece as it's raining here the rest of the week. Went up mums for lunch with the family a Moving Tea party for my sister and niece who are moving to Gloucestershire next week. It was Child 2's bday and him and 2a came back to the flat afterwards before meeting friends at the cinema. When waving them off I spotted this lovely rainbow.

225 Monday I didn't wake till 9.30am, pottered around till mid day, went for coffee and in the evening walked to see my friend, she's off on Safari next month, on her own with 4 kids, I've lent her my camera and walking boots for her and one of the boys. Had an early night after a long, hot and deep bath.

226 Tuesday Woke at 4am vomiting, I think it's food poisoning from last nights gammon, managed to get to the chemist, it settled around 2pm and I went to mums in the afternoon to meet the builders to sort out some remedial work they've been fobbing her off with since she moved in, in January. This is a result of all the dry weather we're getting, people are out more and leave their rubbish behind.

227 Wednesday The all important holiday manicure and pedi and new gel polish in the morning, coffee, visited child 2 and 2a, popped in to say bye to mum and return her car and had an early night.

228 Thursday Caught the National Express Coach from Monmouth at 10.25am, arrived at Manchester airport around 3pm where I'm staying for the night.

229 Friday An early morning flight to Greece, had 2 hours to kill till Peter's flight arrived from Dubai, collected car hire and drove to our self catering accommodation. It's not how it's described online but then we didn't pay for a 5* hotel. There's a whole blog post on the shower alone to come.

230 Saturday I didn't sleep well, but thankfully the area we are in was quiet well before midnight, but for some reason the cleaners were sweeping outside at 5am and by the time the bin lorry came at 5.30am and had a horn tooting row with someone else, I gave up. Peter fetched bread from the bakery and after breakfast we headed to the beach (another blog post on that to come) At midday we had lunch, a beer and the afternoon is being spent chilling out, before dinner tonight.

On the blog this week:
I've been thinking about retirement - What are your plans?
I'm back in South Africa next month - I've started fundraising
The train station back in Dubai is almost finished
I found a new blog linky to showcase my Creating a Garden in the Desert - #MyGloriousGardens with @oldhouseintheshire

How tolerant are you?

I bought a MacBook Air this week and Microsoft Word for Mac.

They offered to install it there and then but I requested an appointment to come back this morning to have it installed to give me the opportunity to play with my new toy and put a list together of things I needed some help with.

So I transferred files from the hard drive, some are corrupted, photos were moved over, the iPhone wasn’t authorised and I couldn’t find the hash tag key #### I also didn’t know how to open a download to have it installed and where to store files and where the search function was. Otherwise I’m more than happy with my new toy.

Now at 42, I know my adult kids think I’m past it when it comes to technology and my 14 year old certainly thinks I shouldn’t be allowed access to the internet, however my Mother thinks I’m a genius in all things technological J.

So when I’m greeted for my 30 minute tutorial by an employee the same age my eldest son, I must admit my hackles were up and I was ready for a fight, but I was so very wrong. He first asked me if I had any experience of Apple OS and I replied ‘other than my iPhone, no’. He then offered to file, move, sort everything for me, authorised my iPhone, discovered he didn’t know where the hash tag #### key on a UK keyboard was located (we found it together) He gave me instructions on how to migrate files so they weren’t corrupted, rather than just copy them across from the hard drive.

He demonstrated the click, 2 finger click (right click) how to close a file, rearrange my icons, open downloads for installing and not once did he demonstrate any kind of frustration with me or make me feel as if I was stupid and shouldn’t be allowed near technology.

Now this is how things should be isn’t it? I have a lot of knowledge about a lot of things and an awful lot of experience, which I use to help others on a daily basis. I’m often approached for advice from child welfare through to international shipping and I give my knowledge and time freely, to strangers off the net and to friends of friends etc.

However I often find I’m on the receiving end having asked for information on how a product, service works and if I can’t get the assistance I need from people who have personal experience I do what we all do, I turn to the professionals, often a free service, they call it customer care on the end of the phone, face to face in a store or via email, letter or telephone and I often find that these people just sometimes don’t care, treat you as if you’ve asked a stupid question or that you are actually stupid.

I tend to find that most visits that involve any kind of request for help for medical aid, cell phone contracts, opening bank accounts, registering a vehicle start like this:

I’m NOT South African, I know how things work in the UK, because that is where I was born, raised, have experience of things. I know in the UK how to phrase questions correctly to get a response, but here I don’t. If I want to ask for a mobile phone contract or ask for a demonstration on a sat nav or god forbid not understand how medical aid works, because where I come from it’s free, then I’m going to ask aren’t I? How else do I learn?

I don’t expect to be laughed at any more than I’d expect you to know how things work in my country either. So that’s why my hackles were up this morning when I entered the Apple Store, but I couldn’t have been more wrong.