One of my neighbours came home to almost exactly that a couple of weeks ago.
She’d missed a welfare call and they immediately sent the police round to find out if she was OK. The police ended up smashing her front door down but having seen the carnage afterwards it was no mean feat.
Neighbour returned that evening from a day out.
That half open window was quite helpful… It was clear enough that there was no immediate danger to the building–especially now that they were there already–and with the neighbor himself on vacation, they really tried to go in causing the least amount of damage. I had feared they might just break down the door but it was quite the opposite. Very professional breaking and entering. Of course minus the stealth someone might need to employ if they meant harm 
That was some ladder… it took 4 people to put it up and take it down again.
I’ve had no hot water for over a week.
I managed to get a plumber round who told me it was a problem for an electrician.
I currently have an electrician here who started making out it was a job for the electric company.
Both checked the fuse for my hot water heater. Neither of them checked the switch the fuse was in. Electrician only checked at my prompting.
Guess what the issue was?
At which point you could have saved yourself some money and done it yourself
I’ve come back from 2 week holiday and I seem to have forgotten how to do my job…
Hot.
But at least I don’t have to wear “proper” clothes again until the library visit on Thursday.
Kaftans are great. My mom used to have a few for hot summers. I remembered just before the heatwaves started here and got myself one 
Just come back (well, logged back in) from a week off, to discover my research proposal has been rejected. It’s a bit of a downer - it was looking like a potential route to something more interesting, as my job doesn’t really play to my strengths, and manages to be both busy and boring much of the time. I’m also feeling under the weather, so really I’d just like to go back to sleep and try again tomorrow!
On Wednesday I have to get up extra early for some blood tests at 7am, so that’s something else to look forward to.
And I just ended up redoing his work.
He’d wired the new switch upside-down. 
To check for sleep apnea, we have been issued a home tester unit for our 10 year old autistic son. This involves running a band with some kind of battery-powered box around his chest, a finger cuff with a cord that runs up his arm then back down to the box, and tubing that rests in his nostrils, goes over his ears then down his neck to the box. Tape is used to hold the tubing to his cheeks and the cord to his arm.
I do not have high hopes of this working out, but with some cajoling, we have managed to get it on him and get him to sleep. I will be sleeping in the kids room tonight to make sure he doesn’t destroy it when he wakes up (usually between 4:30-5:30 AM).
This is a whiny rant. You may wish to skip this message.
A year ago, I joined the team I’m on at work. Teams are small groups that do stuff, how big small is depends on what they’re doing. Some software teams are pretty big, infrastructure teams tend to be small, and when they get big they split up into focused pieces. In my team’s case, we do unspeakable things to real computers, so other people can do unspeakable things to virtual computers running on our real ones. We write tools to make them work the way we want them to, not the way the vendor did, and to shim the vendor’s tooling into the wider environment. There’s lots of cool stuff we’ve been doing, and there’s plenty of scope to figure out a cool thing, and to go do it. We also have to deal with keeping the environment up, expansion, refreshing hardware, and dealing with those pesky people running VMs. But the problem is that we’ve had a bunch of attrition. When I joined, I was the 9th member, which meant the operational load was spread out, dealing with pesky customers and such was limited to an oncall shift every 9 weeks or so. We’re now done to four. That means the oncall is once a month, which sucks. I can’t get anything important done when I’m oncall, there are just too many interruptions, and I’m always interrpted. it also means that a bunch of operational stuff has been shifted onto the poeple who are left, and there’s less time to do “interesting” things. I’ve also spent a bunch of time doing what amounts to legal compliance work, which is annoying as all heck. It’s frustrating as all get out. I have things I want to do, which would make a difference to us and our users, but I don’t have time to do them, because i have to do the other stuff that’s more urgent. There are plenty of things I do like about the job, very few of the people I work with are idiots (not even the high functioning programmer type of idiots, who can write brilliant code, but can’t tie their shoelaces, which I’ve dealt with other places.), the technology is cool, blah, blah, blah (also: the money is good.) My manager is working to fill the positions, but it’s hard to find people with the right skill sets. (Deep system and network knowledge, plus software dev, plus the right people skills, etc) We’ve actually filled a couple of the spots, but for reasons, they’re not starting yet, and they have to do the onboarding which takes a month or six weeks, so it’s going to be a while before it gets better.
That all sounds very whiny, but it’s been making me upset, so you get to hear it. Or not, if you headed the warning in the first paragraph.
Ross’ Day in Britain.
Awoke in agony. I’ve been having some ear trouble, a suspected ear infection, but never had one before.
So on the way to a meeting I pop into a local pharmacist who asks me three questions and confirms it’s probably an inner ear infection, but they can’t give me anything until I’ve seen a doctor.
It’s half past 9. I ring my doctor in the hopes of getting a phone consultation for a prescription.
Nope. Turns out the receptionist can give me a full appointment at my local hospital at 10 o’clock. We both agree I can’t get there on time so we book an afternoon appointment.
I clear it with work, who also tell me not to come back today as making sure my head doesn’t explode is important.
So I turn up for my appointment and get sent by reception to a different reception. Who tell me to go back to the first reception as they always send everyone to the second reception as most people need to go there anyway.
I return to main reception, get signed in and wait.
And wait, for an hour. It’s no issue, I’ve got the day off now and the waiting room is fully air conditioned against the current heat wave.
After an hour I go back to reception and ask how long it’s going to be because I will need to put more money in the parking machine.
Reception tells me not to bother as the parking man had already been for his daily check. They then ring the person I’ve come to see, who has been told I’ve never arrived. Reception explains that I am absolutely here.
I am seen within two minutes. One of my ear canals is “Lovely” and the other one causes her to go “Ooooooooh” in that way plumbers do.
She gives me two copies of the complaint procedure for having to wait.
I go to the pharmacy to get my medication.
Total time from start to finish. 6 hours. Additional costs to me £14.
I don’t really know why I would complain?
I was expecting you to go out to your car to find a parking ticket.
I’d put two hours on. I was out with perhaps 10 minutes to spare.
Ok confession time.
Since lockdown recycle centres in Kent have a pre booked system. You can only turn up with an appointment.
The thing is, whenever I go, I just get waved in by one of the workers sitting in a deckchair.
So last month I booked an appointment. The next available one was for 12:30.
I turned up at 9:45 and I just got waved in.
The whole system is a lie.
I hope you feel better soon. I’ve had ear infections a couple of times and they are thoroughly unpleasant, doubly so if they start affecting your sense of balance. Thankfully, in my experience, they tend to clear up quite quickly.
In a bout of what might be temporary insanity, I just agreed to get solar panels installed on my house. The grand total is something like $45k, but with federal tax credits that expire at the end of the year, it should be more like a total of $33k. Ideally, I will be paying about $150/mo for 25 years, for panels which should come close to offsetting my entire monthly power bill, in a house that I do not anticipate living in for the next 25 years.
On the bright side, the loan is transferable, so we could pass it on to whoever we sell our house to, or pay a couple thousand to have the company move them to a new home and get them re-installed. Site survey to ensure our home can actually have them mounted is next week, then 2-3 months for the actual installation, and a bit later after an inspection, they can actually be turned on.
Hot.
I haven’t worn a t-shirt for the last two days because I instantly overheat. Perks of working from home I suppose.
This is one of those things that I will never understand, why hospital and health centres charge you for parking. Is not like you are going there for fun or anything. And don’t get me started with the prepaid ticket system. “Oh, I may have appendicitis, I will pay for two hours, or shall I put more in case they have a bit of a wait??” Preposterous.
When we got panels installed in 2014, it cost us $30K and the payout was 9 years (ie: we would make $30K, more-or-less, in 9 years).
They have earned slightly more than $4k a year every year since (an average of $350/month… $600 in the summer, $100 in the winter, and one February in 2017 we made $10.14 for the entire month).
Fantastic investment for us. At this point they have more-than paid off themselves and it’s just so lovely to get more than a week’s pay for doing nothing once a month.