never, ever, use FedEx

my father has sent me a present, something he ordered online and that the company sent with FedEx. big mistake. 

i came home one night to find a message saying they'd come by but had been unable to deliver the parcel as i wasn't home. i called them up to organise a new delivery but of course, they don't deliver on Saturdays. i knew i had a couple of hours between two classes on the Monday but that wouldn't work as they couldn't possibly try to deliver at a certain time - the round was the round and they'd get to my town whenever they did, depending on how much else there was to deliver. so there was no point in me even trying. after a long (and expensive) discussion with the woman on the line, i asked what would happen if i couldn't find a neighbour who'd be able to reception the parcel. they didn't have a procedure for that, she said. great. 

after finding a nice and willing neighbour, i called them back with all the details - name, phone number, floor number. the works. but when i got home on the appointed day, they had still tried to deliver to me. 'they' being the people who FedEx outsources the delivery to. apparently, the information about delivering to my number hadn't got to them until after they'd been round, at which point they called him and said they'd redeliver on the following day. this was, of course not possible for him. or for me. so they said they'd deliver on Saturday. uh, Saturday? did they actually deliver on that day?? yes, they apparently said. 

i called FedEx again. would the parcel be delivered on Saturday? when i explained the story, she was like: 'well, you should be happy then'. uh... yes, assuming they'd actually come. i wasn't waiting around all day for nothing. could she confirm they would come? after being put on hold for a while, she asked me to call back the next day to find out, as the company they outsourced to wasn't answering the phone right then. 

i called the next day. no, they wouldn't deliver on Saturday. they never did. i wanted to strangle someone. so now what? in the end, i asked them to deliver to my father, at the other end of the country. at least this way the parcel wouldn't be returned to Denmark.

snow nightmare

lots and lots of snow... amazing and gorgeous. and a complete nightmare on the roads yesterday. if only they'd warned us about the quantities! ... wait, hang on, they did: we've been on orange alert for 2 days. orange alert. not your usual snow day, not even in this area. how did this not make an impression on whoever's in charge of the snowploughs? 

result: total chaos in my town. i was stuck for the longest time on the alternative route (this was after i'd given up on the main one) when i decided i couldn't be bothered. i would take the long way, which also turned out to be the fast one as there was no one there. in the end, it still took me 1h15 to get into work instead of 30 mns at normal rush hour (and 15 at off peak time). luckily, on the way home, things were much easier: most people having stayed home, there was no one on the motorway.

snow tires on ice

snow tires do not, in fact, work on ice. this i found out while i was leaving the parking lot in the mountain yesterday.

i saw this driver get stuck up a small slope and thought, idiot, didn't come equipped. i reversed to get out another way but turned out i either had to go all the way around the whole resort or go back to that small slope. no worries - i have 4 snow tires! so up i went. and got stuck. tried to let the car go backward a bit and get a grip and momentum but it was veering close to the other cars. i went out to see if there was too much snow stopping the tires but no. i tried again and again, with and without the ice setting, or whatever it is. nothing worked. i was just getting closer and closer to the other cars. thought i'd put on the chains and see how that worked but when i opened the boot, i realised i'd left them in the garage. typical. i was stuck. so i thought i'd try to flag down a passing car and hope someone would be kind enough to stop. after passing me by, and thus avoiding getting stuck themselves, 2 cars stopped and 3 people helped me push the car. the problem, it turned out, was that the car was sitting on ice. snow tires of not, the car would never have budged on its own. i was really glad those people helped me, and really ashamed to have thought the other car was driven by an idiot. i should have helped him out.

snowshoeing again

i went snowshoeing this afternoon. it was great! this one was a bona fide trail through the forest and it was gorgeous. tons of snow. and when i got to a choice of 2 trails, one trodden, one not, i obviously went for the untouched one. that really is the life. the only thing was that i kept stopping and taking pictures, which meant that it was taking forever, so that it was obviously going to take me a lot longer than the one hour it was advertised.

thoughts on guy 3

i met guy 3 a few months ago. i don't know if i imagined it but he seemed quite keen. he was tall and built like someone who could protect all the girls in the world and seemed nice. he also looked like he was in his early twenties, which felt a bit young, seen as i just turned 37 a few days ago. i later found out he was actually 30, which helped a lot, but as i didn't see him again until last Friday, that was pretty much it. the little info i got out of that evening was that he was gallant and always ready to help.

he was also at guy 1's party the other night, where i found out a little more. although he clearly has some life experience, he was dressed like a teenager and some of the things he said were the kinds of things you say when you haven't quite reached a certain stage in your life. and he looks like he's on the verge of becoming a bodybuilder. although this clearly makes a woman (well, me) feel safe, it's just a little too much and, to my mind, distracts from the fact that he's otherwise pretty good looking. apparently, he's also still single (i say 'still' cos he was apparently single when i met him in September), which another guy just couldn't understand. as far as he was concerned, guy 3 should have girls flocking around him.

the 2 parties

my party took place in a pub. i rarely go there but it's where i celebrated my birthday last year. the guys behind the bar remembered and that apparently got me my first (out of 3) glass of champagne. luckily, someone broke one of them - i was driving and i seriously needed not to drink alcohol. it was really great to see everyone there - some people i really hadn't seen in ages, and it made me want to organise more stuff. the question is just when to fit that into my crazy life! 

the few people who were still there at 11.30 left, at which point i made my way to guy 1's party, which was at his place. and it was packed with people. he was ever so slightly drunk, which was quite funny. he was talking to a group when i arrived so i made my way to the kitchen, where he'd said the rest of the improv people were. i guess i could have made an effort to get to know his other friends but we'd seen each other the previous evening and i'd just spent most of my party trying to catch up with people whom i hadn't seen in ages so i don't think i was a priority just then, even if he did seem happy to see me. i found the others and we played improv games for a couple of hours, after which we and 4 others were basically the only people left so we all just talked in the kitchen until i decided that 2.45 was a respectable time to go home. 

tears of laughter

i was at my improv session last night and boy was it funny! i don't remember much else but this one activity had me in tears, which was pretty useless of me seen as i was in it and supposed not to laugh. the point of the activity was for 2 of us to explain to our boss why we were late, and our explanation was based on the miming of someone standing behind the boss. but i simply couldn't keep a straight face as the miming was hilarious and pretty nonsensical, as far as i was concerned. 

within about a minute, i was laughing my head off and a few seconds later, crying. to try to keep some kind of composure, i then pretended to be very sad and sobbing, hiding my face on my partner's shoulder and leaving him to try to work it out. i don't remember much of what was going on cos i was desperately trying to control myself... with dismal results! amazingly, it seemed like i was having more luck figuring out the miming than my partner, although i couldn't make head or tail of how it all fit together. and i mean, let's face it, would anyone else have guessed that we were late because we made eggs for breakfast, then had a stomachache, after which our neighbours came to ask if we could babysit their baby and then our grandmother fell down the stairs and splattered our cat???? our story ended up running something like the eggs and stomachache, after which i gave birth and fell over a zimmerframe - which our boss on purpose interpreted as me giving birth to a zimmerframe - and the cat fell in the stairs. good effort, i say.

the cringe moment

i invited a few of my colleagues to the birthday party tomorrow, but not everyone.  as it turns out, i've invited my whole team bar one person - the one with whom i have nothing in common, whom i see about once a month and with whom hanging out has never been discussed, not once in over 4 years.

this morning, we had a team meeting. i thought about warning the others that she hadn't been invited but as i couldn't quite see how my birthday party would come in to the conversation during a work meeting, i decided against it. they all knew i hadn't invited everyone, surely that was enough. apparently not. our line manager decided to close the meeting by saying that we would all see each other tomorrow evening and, as if that wasn't enough, asked if there would be a team photo op. to which i said not everyone had RSVP-ed yet. had it been anyone else, i would probably have invited her to join us but i find her quite annoying and seriously, this is my birthday party, not a work thing.