Falls and crashes ...

Two caídas (falls): You may laugh (now) at the first of these, which involved an unidentified wet patch on the bathroom floor, probably leaked in via the porous roof, the result of which, I ended up, legs in the air, one either side of the bidet. Actually, I did hurt myself: I bruised my elbow on something and my right arm ended up inside the bath, so the rim of the bath came up under my armpit. That caused great pain in my shoulder. Falling on my bum reactivated an old "war wound" from when I slipped down the slope outside the house in the rain six years ago and hurt my hip. My back aches ... In fact, I just ache everywhere, even in parts I didn't know I had, but for the first few days, all I could stand to do was lie flat.

Just when I could manage a bit more time at the computer, my internet connection decided to suffer a caída (also the word used in Spanish to mean "crash" in this context.) One never expects much from Spain's former nationalized phone company, Telefonica, but their level of "help" for DSL customers, it has to be said, reaches an all-time low. I'd go elsewhere, but it took me 6 or 7 years to get them to give me broadband here and, there is no alternative at all in this rural area yet. So, after running all the diagnostics, it tells me that the broadband isn't working right now. Well, that was bloody helpful, wasn't it? That did infer that my setup was OK and the problem was therefore at the other end. Nothing new there. The DSL gadget at our local exchange suffered a total caída a while back and we were offline while they had to get that fixed. It could have happened again.

You would think that the natural thing to do would be to call the "help" line and, that is what I did. As soon as I got through, I was told, in no uncertain terms, like I was a naughty child or a piece of shit, that I had to completely unplug everything and basically do the technicians' job before they would even talk to me. They wouldn't check the situation at the local exchange first, to see if it might have been them and, that might have saved me the bother. Crawling about on the floor, twisting round the back of the computer, at my age and in my state of health was no picnic. And the first two goes just made the situation worse.

Many swear words later, I decided just to leave it. Later, third time lucky - probably by then, whatever it was at their end that, I suspect, had been broken, had been fixed - fortunately, because I really didn't want to have to talk to those nasty rude people again. But it really shouldn't have to be like this, especially when it costs me around $100 a month for this "pleasure".