Posted by Ed (33 and a half) writes:
My sister’s broadband had stopped working so I rang her ISP’s help desk. After 30 minutes of stupid, obvious questions they said they’d have to send a BT engineer to have a look. When they told me it was going to cost £180 I told them to get stuffed and decided to have a go at it myself.
Anyhow, it was Twenty20 finals day so I thought it’d be a grand idea to have the telly on so I could catch the mascot race. When I first switched on there was some other game on from a couple of years ago so I got the BT master socket wiring diagram out and studied it.
It turns out that only two of the BT drop lines have to be connected (orange and white). Furthermore, only three wires need to be connected for the extension sockets (the fourth is only connected for neatness).
The first semi-final had started, so I had a cheese butty and a well-deserved sit down. Once I’d washed my first food of the day down with a cup of tea, I popped out for a ciggie.
Halfway through chasing the first extension cable through the kitchen wall I heard the commentators say that Napier was in. By the time I got to the telly he was out.
My sister came home with her two kids. They had been to some other child’s party and Chloe (my niece) gave me a piece of sponge cake. I don’t really like cake but I had to humour her. They then left to go to another party.
I was just about done with the phone socket for the Sky box when the mascot race came on the tube. I downed tools, got a beer from the fridge and parked myself on the couch. It was an epic, dingdong battle. Despite my loathing of the giraffe, I had to support him.
The giraffe lost. It was disgraceful.
I finished up and put all their furniture back in place. I had another beer and a packet of smokey bacon crisps.
I went home and watched the final while I had fish finger butties for tea. I had some more beers and went to bed.
Who won?
He means who won the mascot race, before you all start pouncing.
Quite right.
Like I give a jott about cricketing…
I think it was that thing from Surrey – Kenny summuturuther.
yesssss. get in. [me/air punches] Up the Kenny Kennington!
How many beers in total?
roughly?
Did you get the broadband working? You said that you finished up, but that’s not the same thing.
And did you have to eat any more cake when the children came back from their second party?
Children are just party animals aren’t they. masterceci went to some girl’s house the other night for a “sleepover” party.
May I have the recipe for the fishfinger sandwiches?
Brian: I think it was a shitload, but it may have been more.
Jo: The broadband and telephones all worked a treat. I wasn’t there when the kids came back from the second party, so the cake intake was, thankfully, curtailed.
Ceci: fishfinger sarnnies should only be eaten while drunk – so the recipe usually consists of whatever comes to hand. Red sauce, tartare sauce, some fishfingers, some bread and a little butter. It’s a bit like eating tramp sick – you just don’t taste it ’til the morning.
Excellent report, ED33.5, although I thought the Napier reference was a little surplus to requirements, personally.
What do you plan to do with the £180 you saved by not getting the BT man out?
Is that a saving? What constitutes a saving?
Surely Ed hadn’t allocated £180 for BT emergencies and therefore isn’t blessed with a cash surplus.
It amounts to saving. £180 not spent is £180 saved.
So go buy a quarter of a new plasma tv.
We didn’t just buy Normandy. We’ve saved the monetary value of Normandy.
We should go and splash out on something.
I wonder how many plasma tellys you could get for one Normandy?
More importantly, how many fish finger butties did YOU get for £180?
LCD is better than plasma.
Next time my broadband breaks please could you come round and fix it? I’ll make fish finger butties as payment.
The first thing I’d do, if I had a 180 quid, would be to buy a pot to piss in. Fishfinger butties would have to puchased out of the change.
By my own logic, we are all millionaires as long as we don’t spend money on loads of expensive things.
So as soon as you do spend the money, you cease to be a millionaire.
It’s called Schrodinger economics – as made up by me.
Schrodinger economics has decreed that we have been independently wealthy for quite some years now.
How expensive does a purchase need to be to counteract millionairedom? We bought a telly from Aldi this week.
I think only Ed can answer this as he is the one on the cutting edge of this type of thinking – he sounds incredibly rich if you count up all money he hasn’t spent.
Schrodinger economics – Is that anything to do with quantum mechanics?
You seem to have missed the fact that the money I saved was actually saved on behalf of my sister. All I got out of the deal was a couple of cheap cans of cooking lager.
Bugger – my sister’s just seen the crack about the cooking lager. I’m in the shite now!
A little to do with quantum mechanics but i’ve never really understood it.
So your sister is the rich one, Schrodinger-style? Does that make you a freeloader or not?
This is getting so complicated…
If she buys cheap lager, then according to Schrodinger economics, she’s rich, so it’s more acceptable to mooch off her.
That’s right, isn’t it?
I don’t understand what Schrodinger economics has to do with putting cats (disinterested or not) in boxes with radioactive material.
It’s all about the potential – not knowing what is or is not. By not spending money, you don’t know how rich you are (or not).
But you can confidently say you are not as poor as you might have been. So you could argue you are a millionaire. It is just you don’t know.
Like you don’t know whether the cat is alive or dead.
Schrodinger economics – easy.
But surely the key principle of Schrodinger economics is that you don’t know whether you’re rich or poor until you open your bank statement?
Until then, you exist in a state of limbo. Or “overdraught”.
What the hell is Kenny Kennington? Surely Surrey could have had a shark or something? Or would that have scared the dancing girls?