F. F. F. Frustration, F. F. F. F. Frustration!

No, I won’t allow myself to use foul language here; I wouldn’t wish to offend anybody reading my latest few words but I can tell you that I have set the air on fire here at home this morning. It was ablaze. Mary busied herself with something to do in the west wing (the bedroom) so as to keep out of my way and to ensure the safety of her ears and her sensibilities. She knew there was no point in approaching me with rational soothings – experience has taught her this – and she left me alone to come through the episode.

There was an urgent need this morning to send a few photographs to a magazine for publication. I can hear the cogs of your minds turning now and you wondering why this should have lead to my near meltdown. Well, you haven’t – or, perhaps, you have! – had the experience of an email programme/company (Eir.ie, in my case) which is incapable of transferring even one photograph from my laptop to the recipient. I tried it using the email programme on my laptop and then by going to the e-mail host online but failed in both attempts. The files were too large – one photograph! So, I edited the photographs to reduce them to half size and they were still too large. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

One of the photographs which could not travel: Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’

A balancing act came into play at this stage for I could certainly reduce the size of the photographs further but the printers would wish to have them at high resolution for best results on paper. (As an aside, I believe printers regularly demand an unnecessarily high resolution, asking for full resolution photographs and not taking into account that modern cameras produce files which could be printed on the side of my house and still look sharp. But that’s a gripe for another day – and I like to have a few spare gripes to hand in case there arrives a day when I’m feeling too happy in myself.) Having reached the stage of the lowest passable resolution for printing and still being unable to forward these, even individually, via email I took to the telephone in search of Technical Support.

You know the routine and how irritating it is when you are already vexed: “Choose from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Enter your account number. Enter the last four digits from your telephone number. Your call will be recorded for quality purposes.” And then, just to make my day complete, “We are experiencing EXTREMELY high volumes of calls at the moment and there will be very long delays.” And, then, “Technical Support is available online where you can chat with a representative” – a glimmer of hope crept into my frazzled mind and I went to the internet, to Eir.ie, to “MyEir”, only to be told that my account had been suspended – did they know I was coming and had taken evasive action? I know this probably arose because Eir gave me a new account number recently after I contacted them to query why I was paying so much – after over 40 years as a customer – when new customers were paying only a fraction of that. The “Loyalty Team” very pleasantly reduced my tariff while leaving me with the same “bundle”. I sorted out the login process, reset my password, and proceeded to Technical Support – as you have anticipated, they were “extremely busy and very long delays are to be expected.”

I circumvented the whole e-mail situation by uploading to a Dropbox folder. The upload was a little slow – full resolution photographs – but they got there which makes me wonder why the e-mail programme/service couldn’t manage the very same rate of upload.

I’m going to the garden where Eir and its e-mails or lack of Technical Support do not impinge.

Mmmmmmmmmm Calm!

I am calming down, down, down… Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’

All is calm again…. Magnolia x loebneri ‘Leonard Messel’