A forced break from coffee
At a risk of paraphrasing someone famous, today is a day that will live on in infamy. This morning, for no good reason, our treasured coffee machine stopped. Completely. Oh, sure, I can get bursts of steam, but the necessary feature, which pours heated water over ground beans… done.
We pondered our possibilities. We explored the repairability of a twelve-year-old machine (essentially null). We shopped, and then we got into the car and drove. Even that seemed jinxed, when the car refused to start after a short halt in Souris. Many thanks to the young man in the muddy truck, who provided a quick boost.
With that behind us, we went straight to the city, and upsold ourselves on a machine with many, many features. So many, I haven’t dared open the box yet. That can be done before dawn (when the next coffee is due).
I also spent more time on the phone with the sat dish crew. Everything we did yesterday had to be redone (do people on service desks ever read the notes in a customer’s file?) First offer: send out a technician, with a payment of $75 for the visit. I replied that between paying a tech to verify THEIR gear, and an outright cancellation of service, there wasn’t much wiggle room. Back to the onscreen menus. Second offer: replace the hardware at no cost, other than my returning the prepaid shipping carton to a local courier. I can handle that, I guess. We’ll have to wait about ten days for the next installment in the saga, and meanwhile, there’s always Netflix.
