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Early morning
Apr. 16th, 2009 07:21 amIt's strange how jetlag seems to have affected us in entirely opposite ways. At the moment, after going backwards five time zones, Whitney struggles to stay awake during the day and wants to sleep immediately on getting home, but I've been up since 3am two days in a row and have experienced no symptoms of lack of sleep beyond my usual cloudy head. But that's hardly noticeable relatively, because I decided to stop taking temazepam on flights, as its effects got less and less dramatic over time (after the first time gloriously made me sleep every moment of the flight from take-off to landing). The plane wasn't that bad on the way back - my actual fear of flying has almost gone and has been replaced with a nagging feeling that if I think about the unlikely physics of it too much while we're in the air then we'll just fall out of the sky Douglas Adams-style, but it's usually such a dull experience even when I have more electronics on me than in the cockpit. Like the journey to London last week, there were only about fifty people on this flight once again with boarding done in five minutes, so we moved ourselves up to the exit row, and even the gap of five hours between flights at the most overcrowded boring shopping centre in the world, Heathrow Terminal 3, didn't seem all that long. Immigration let me through with my letter authorizing travel with no problems, and after a couple of questions at Customs we got the consignment of essential British supplies through as well.
When we got back I was very pleased that the MBTA had sent me an apologetic letter for imprisoning me along with a hundred other passengers for forty minutes in the heat underneath the streets of Boston with no word from anyone about what was happening. Well, it doesn't say that, just that they were sorry for any inconvenience and frustration. (Which there was a lot of - I eventually had to phone the information line after finding a passenger who happened to have an MBTA leaflet, to alert somebody on the surface that we were trapped.) Enclosed was a free $4 ticket to make up for the fare of the journey (but not that of the taxi that I paid for with a fellow refugee afterwards), which I'll probably use today as I'm planning to finally drag myself into the office.
And I had to phone the bank as well when we got back, because London was so expensive that I overdrew my thought-to-be-safe bank account, and the Bank of Scotland sent me seven separate charge letters ranging from £28 to £35, one for each time I so much as bought a sandwich when overdrawn. So I contacted them and somehow managed to get most of the charges reversed through a combination of charm and Jedi mind trickery - I hardly had to do anything, as the man on the other end of the line sounded perfectly panicked from the start, but it was the tactic of going for "These charges are under a court hearing at the moment, aren't they?" that really set him off, starting a five-minute long argument with himself where I just had to sit back and listen to him go from explaining the reasons why the charges couldn't be taken off to eventually removing most of them and bringing the fine down from ludicrous to merely very, very high. And if it's decided that their overdrawn charges are illegal after all in July (which it will) then I'll make sure to get the rest back as well. This doesn't compare with the mastery of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kennymacdonald, who argued bank charges to the point where bailiffs were sent to the bank's head office to uplift assets to their value, but it's a start.
When we got back I was very pleased that the MBTA had sent me an apologetic letter for imprisoning me along with a hundred other passengers for forty minutes in the heat underneath the streets of Boston with no word from anyone about what was happening. Well, it doesn't say that, just that they were sorry for any inconvenience and frustration. (Which there was a lot of - I eventually had to phone the information line after finding a passenger who happened to have an MBTA leaflet, to alert somebody on the surface that we were trapped.) Enclosed was a free $4 ticket to make up for the fare of the journey (but not that of the taxi that I paid for with a fellow refugee afterwards), which I'll probably use today as I'm planning to finally drag myself into the office.
And I had to phone the bank as well when we got back, because London was so expensive that I overdrew my thought-to-be-safe bank account, and the Bank of Scotland sent me seven separate charge letters ranging from £28 to £35, one for each time I so much as bought a sandwich when overdrawn. So I contacted them and somehow managed to get most of the charges reversed through a combination of charm and Jedi mind trickery - I hardly had to do anything, as the man on the other end of the line sounded perfectly panicked from the start, but it was the tactic of going for "These charges are under a court hearing at the moment, aren't they?" that really set him off, starting a five-minute long argument with himself where I just had to sit back and listen to him go from explaining the reasons why the charges couldn't be taken off to eventually removing most of them and bringing the fine down from ludicrous to merely very, very high. And if it's decided that their overdrawn charges are illegal after all in July (which it will) then I'll make sure to get the rest back as well. This doesn't compare with the mastery of
kennymacdonald, who argued bank charges to the point where bailiffs were sent to the bank's head office to uplift assets to their value, but it's a start.
