yay for customer service that really helps

[kareina]

 While on the bus home today the shop called—they have now fixed the car. Since I was mostly home, there was no possibility to get there to pick it up today, so it will have to be tomorrow. Since it broke the day before we were to do our annual inspection (which we obviously cancelled), the first thing we have to do upon picking it up is to get it inspected. I opted to use the station closest to my house, in Ånäset (since it is legal to drive to the inspection place if you have time booked and paid for). They are part of a national chain, but I got to their web page from clicking on their entry on Google Maps. When the page opened, it clearly stated on the first page that it was Opus Ånäset. I wrote by licence plate number in the box, pressed “Inspection” chose a suitable time tomorrow, paid, and started copying information into the calendar. When I went to copy the address it looked strange. Looked closer. It turns out that the web page changed the location when I wasn’t looking, and I was booked to a workshop in Stockholm! So I found their customer service number, called them straight away and she re-booked me to Ånäset for tomorrow, and I got a new email straight away showing the new time. It arrived even before we hung up the phone. Yay for real customer service that can solve a problem so easily!

 

Now I just need to take my normal bus in in the morning, then catch the bus to the other side of Umeå, and drive to Ånäset.

 

In other news, it was a very pleasant day at work. The electrician finally had time to come do wiring in the attic, so I caught a later bus than usual, so I could show him all the places we want outlets etc up there. This meant that I arrived at work at 09:20. Fika is normally 09:30, but I thought, nah, I will do some work before the Archaeology Subject meeting at 10:00. But first I needed to re-fill my water bottle, so I grabbed the bottle, locked my office door, and started walking towards the stairs. Ran into a handful of our PhD students, who were on their way to fika, so I joined them.

 

We had a pleasant chat, and then went to the meeting, where we had cake, to celebrate a handful of published papers by a couple of people in the department.

Between both fika and the meeting, I got lots of embroidery done on the Keldor copper trim tunic. The meeting ended in time for lunch, so I joined colleagues for lunch, and had a pleasant time explaining to Sofie about the SCA and the embroidery on Keldor’s kaftan. Then I returned to my office to work, realised that I had left my water bottle in the fika room (having set it down before washing my dishes), so I went back for it, and got into another conversation with another colleague, largely about medieval stone churches in Sweden.

 

I had never really thought about the fact that there was no pre-existing stone building tradition in this region, so when it became necessary for all of the Swedish churches to suddenly build in stone, they needed to import lots of expertise, and, up here, they even had to import the lime to make the mortar, as there is none. All this meant that it was after 13:00 before I finally started working, and had only till time to leave to catch the 14:30 bus for work in my office. I did keep working on the bus, of course, till the shop called to say that the car was ready, so I called Keldor to let him know, and chatted till I was nearly home.

 

He stayed late to work on some projects for the house, one of which was making a cover extension for the laundry room threshold, which meant we could swap the places of the washer and drying on their shelf, so now their doors open out away from one another, so it will be much easier to transfer stuff from one to the other. Then we replaced the old, short hose with a new, longer one, which we ran up against the threshold, with the new cover extension over it, so that no one will trip on the hose.

 

Then we checked the attic and the progress up there. Yay! Now we have a light switch also at the top of the stairs, there is a small wall mounted electric heater in the bathroom, there is a working outlet just outside the bathroom by the door, and one on the other side of the bathroom in the cold side of the attic, so we can have light over there, too. The electrician has also drawn wires and set in the plastic boxes where the outlets will be in the walls we haven’t finished building, so now we can finish putting up the last of the insulation and make the walls themselves. The Create an attic bedroom and Create extra bathrooms projects are really moving forward!