Have you ever bribed your child to sit still and be quiet – I have.  In fact yesterday I spent more on iTunes than most record company moguls spend in a month.  Yes, I understand they don’t actually spend money on iTunes but you get my drift.

I think I have been paying for the ups and downs of being a very disorganised mother

Up

It’s school holidays

Down

It’s school holidays

Up

Little Pencil was going to a friend for the day and I was going to work

Down

Friend’s mum called to say they were busy in the morning

Up

I have the most flexible work arrangements in the universe so I could work from home in the morning and go in later in the day after dropping Little Pencil at his friend

Down

The friend called to say their arrangements had changed could we come in the morning.

Up

Either way was good for me
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Down

Little Pencil caught a tummy bug

Up

It was not very bad

Down

It was bad enough that he could not go to a friend’s house.  Not with my conscience clear.

Up

He could come to the office with me

So there I was at the office with a not very sick child, a lot of work to complete, an iTouch, a novel, not enough snacks and a very frayed mood.  Did I mention  that I am moving house at the end of the week?

My child is an angel, really he is.  But even angels are not so good at sitting in an office for hours on end.

And he tried so hard.  But every time I needed to move he moved with me; every time I needed to concentrate he read aloud to me; every time I needed it to be quiet he sang.  Every time I got cold he would open the door but every time I got warm he would insist on closing the door.  Every time I offered him something to eat he refused but as soon as I got involved in something else he would ask for food.  It was a nightmare and my nerves were frayed.

So I resorted to Bribery 101 and said he could download some apps for his iTouch.  I reckoned I was paying for some peace and quiet and I swatted away my feelings of being a very bad mother, a useless worker and a hideous multi tasker. I just knew that if he had “unlimited” access to downloads I would off the hook for hours.

He downloaded an app and immediately began to beg me to play monopoly on the iTouch.  He literally chased me around my own office with the screen of his iTouch glaring at me furiously.  What kind of cruel monster creates a monopoly application?

We left the office. And I remembered that I had forgotten to give him lunch.

This was the first day of holidays – today was worse.

At the risk of sounding like a caller on talk back radio (especially in light of the fact that I recently gabbed on about how young I am), I have to ask what on earth has happened to customer service.

Let me fill you in on the back story

As my reader would know I am renovating my house, well I am not renovating it per se – the builder is doing that, I am just doing the stressing.

Everything has been going along really well and apparently we should be delighted at the speed that the work is taking place – that and the fact that there have been no “surprises”.  Well no surprises until we were informed that the floorboards needed to be replaced.

Floorboards are expensive after the mark up that the resellers make and people who sell floorboards stand to make a lot of money from people who they sell to.  People like me and Mr Pencil who have to replace the floors before the builder and his ladder disappear into the huge black holes that keep appearing where the floors used to be.

So we took our bundles of cash (if a credit card is a bundle of cash) and we make for the timber flooring stores.

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Second shop we go to the man stands as we approach. I am briefly filled with joy.  We explain that we are looking for a limed American Oak, his response – “Oh do we supply that?”  Fantastic – he has NO idea.  He then spends 10 minutes telling us that he is very new on the job, doesn’t know the stock and is not sure of the difference between floating and fitted floors.  I briefly think of explaining it to him but my husband convinces me that his boss will give him that training – any month now.

Next we go to a shop with a huge showroom – well actually lots of little rooms all with different floors.  None of the lights have been switched on so you actually can’t see a thing.  The people working there clearly do not believe that they will ever attract a customer, it’s hard to get business when you avoid eye contact at all costs and then give a death stare if someone actually gets your attention.  We stumble around looking for the light switches so that we can see the product and we force someone to help us.  She knows as much about flooring as she knows about lighting – nothing.

Eventually we find a shop where someone is willing to engage with us.  We make a time for them to come to the house and quote on the job.  He walks in a shouts at me that I have terrible floors.  Er, I know this , that is why I am paying you lots and lots of money to give me new floors.  He shouts some more and shakes his head vigorously.  I ask him to just give me a recommendation and a quote – he says he refuses to do the job.  May I just say at this point that the floors are really not that bad.  Thin? Yes?  But so bad as to refuse a job? No.  I don’t think so.

Luckily Adonis, my builder (I call him Adonis – Mr Pencil calls him – actually let’s not go there), has a flooring man come out to see us.  Why he waited until we had pulled all our hair out before he shared this piece of wisdom I am not sure.  Anyway this man – we’ll call him Mick, because that is what his parents called him – walks into the house and says “Okay – let’s do limed oak, let’s do prefinished fitted boards and let’s get this job done on Saturday”.  I immediately get over Adonis and fall in love with Mick.  Fickle ? Yes But I have the coolest floorboards you can imagine and we gave this man the job without even getting a quote.

Why can’t everyone be like Mick?  How hard can it be to want to make your customers happy?

I have waited for such a long time to feel all grown up but, at 40 something (something very low), I can safely say that I don’t feel any closer to being there.

With no offence at all to my mother, she was always old.  Not old in a bad way and not even old as in she was 90 when I was born, because obviously she wasn’t, but she was always old in a mature way, she acted like a grown up. I have kept expecting that to happen to me, for me to be grown up like my mother.  In fact I can’t believe that I have a child and I make a vague attempt at running a home and holding down some semblance of a job. I actually only feel about 16.  Sadly I probably look about 56.

I remember when I was a little girl and my mother had friends over – they always seemed to sit on chairs and speak about very sombre, serious and worldly stuff.  When my friends come over I sit on the floor and I talk absolute nonsense, mainly obsessing about what I should eat and then complaining that I eat too much.

I look at teens in their school uniforms sneaking a cigarette outside the service station and I genuinely believe that I am one of them (not that I am at school or that I am a smoker but that I might be a bit of a rebellious teenager).  But I have never been included and in fact none of these people have ever made eye contact with me.  My husband says it is because they see me as an old woman.  I think they can tell that I am just not a smoker.

I like the same music as my 13 year old nephew and I am convinced that my 19 year old niece sees me as her contemporary.  She just doesn’t want me to hang with her and her friends because I am family.  It can’t possibly be because I am old and staid and boring, because I am not.
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My favourite food would have to be plain butter cake with blue icing.  No grown ups like that do they? Do they?

And then the other night I went out and some genuinely young person looked right at me and without a flicker of hesitation, she  said to her friend “Why are there so many old people here tonight?”

I remain shattered.

Seems I may really be grown up after all.  Why is it that I never felt it happen?

Yesterday I was sitting at home working, feeling stressed and a little wrung out, I thought that the best thing I could do would be to walk the dog.  Break the stress, get some fresh air and indulge Fluffy Pencil’s favourite pastime  – leaving the house.

I grabbed my iPod, my phone and the dog and set off for a brisk walk.  It was bloody freezing and I was not dressed appropriately.  But I persevered because there is nothing Fluffy Pencil loves more than a walk (other than leaving the house of course).

Half an hour of exercise and freezing cold wind on my back and I boldly and confidently approached my front door, as you do when it is your own front door.  I turned the handle.   Nothing happened.  Except of course my heart fell to the floor.  I had locked myself out of the house.

You know that blind panic that sets in when you realise that you have just done something really stupid, the same panic that forces you to try open the same locked door repeatedly with the exact same outcome?  I was deep in that panic.

I quickly thought to phone my sister who has a spare key.  Saved.  Then I remembered that she has a key for the real house – not the one we are living in.  No one has a spare key for this house*

After I had tried the door about 8 times I realised it was not going to work. So I decided to test the security of the windows.

I removed the fly screens and this feeling of accomplishment buoyed me for about 12 seconds.  I thought I had it nailed.  What I did not take into account is that once the fly screens were gone there was still the glass to get through.  I am happy to report to Little Pencil, who often sits up at night worrying about break-ins, that our windows are impenetrable.  At least impenetrable to a 41 year old mother with a dog yapping at her feet.

The panic started to rise even more so I did what any confident, self assured and together woman would do – I phoned my husband, Mr Pencil to cry.  He didn’t pick up the phone.

I took out 5 minutes of breaking and entering to explain to the woman across the road that I was not trying to break into the house I was just trying to get in.  Without a key

Then I cased the neighbour’s house.  We are living in a semi.  You cannot climb over the wall of a semi. It is an internal wall. So I called my Mr Pencil and he didn’t answer

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So Fluffy Pencil and I walked around the block again and phoned Mr Pencil again.  He didn’t answer the phone again.

I remembered that I had left the back door open so if I could just hop over the back wall I would be home and hosed.  Well at least home.

The house behind me was locked and barred.  There was no way of breaking into that one if I could not even break into my own one.  So I phoned Mr Pencil so that he could ignore me and Fluffy Pencil licked my legs.

I decided to think positive.  I would go and sit in the park and work on my very handy iPhone. Except I only had one bar of battery and I was freezing cold.  I was even scared to keep trying to call Mr Pencil lest I use up all my battery and finally get through to him and manage to only sob before we get cut off.  But I called him anyway and he didn’t answer.

About 15 minutes had passed (that felt like 30 days) I was preparing my speech for Mr Pencil.  I was practising tone and everything.  My rant was going to be about how it was his fault (I needed some time to work on this angle) and how impossible it was to get hold of him when I needed him.  As I worked out how he would respond I heard his voice – “but there’s a spare key hidden on top of the …….”**

Of course there was.  But I could not reach it.  I went and got the huge green bin, did a quick prayer of thanks to Maria who had cleaned it with disinfectant and hauled it over to the ___**.  I climbed on the bin, knocked my knee, my head and my elbow and through my tears I spotted the key.

I opened the door, the Fluffy Pencil fell asleep and Mr Pencil called me back.

*turns out I was wrong

** I can’t tell you where it is because you may want to break in and shout at my husband for ignoring my calls