Day 50: Descaling, disputing, defrosting
Pathos
Day 50 was marked by little victories.
The first came in the form of getting my dispute accepted by my bank for some cancelled flights I had booked via Gotogate, which they were refusing to give me a refund for. Then they just stopped answering the phone, and sent me an email saying they converted my tickets to open ones. How lovely. I was determined to win, and I knew how.
Back in 2012, when real problems existed, I was in a similar (but not-so-similar) situation, in which I went to an aspiring music festival in London. The organisers used a ticketing system which basically let all attendees make copies of their tickets and let fifteen of their friends in for free. It was overcrowded, to say the least. We couldn’t get into any of the stages. The police shut it down for health and safety reasons, just a few hours after it started. Ironically, the festival was called Bloc.
The organisers tried to save it by hosting smaller events around London for the rest of the weekend, to at least make sure the artists they booked had something to do. We tried to go to one, one night later, the last sign of faith not being entirely lost. In classic London fashion, the queue was massive. In even more classic London fashion, it started raining heavily. After an hour of being in the rain, stoically waiting to get in, a security guard came and told everyone that the venue was full, and we should go home. We went to an empty club in Elephant & Castle. My favourite moment of that entire weekend was sitting in a dry taxi and singing along to Better Off Alone.
On Monday, the festival organisers declared bankruptcy, and probably moved to Colombia with all the ticket money. When a company goes bankrupt, it does not have any legal obligation to return any money to its customers. That’s when I discovered bank chargebacks. Thank you, 2012, for being a shitty year, but preparing me for 2020.
As part of becoming middle-aged in quarantine, I tried to descale my kettle using vinegar. To every Italian’s disappointment, I did not use balsamic. The descaling went surprisingly well. I’m not sure if this is a metaphor for everyone’s time in lockdown, but I could see the bottom once again.
In other domestic problems, the fridge temperature setting remains one of life’s great unexplained mysteries. Does going from a smaller to a larger snowflake mean higher temperature, or does it mean the fridge will become more icey? We have been switching back and forth between the setting since we became real adults and began to do bigger shops, around seven weeks ago, but the answer remains unclear, and the person who designed the temperature setting must now be working for the government.
My work laptop has a screensaver setting I probably switched to and forgot about more than a year ago, which shows a new word every time it comes on. My screensaver knows my life.
Lunch: Black eyed beans and sgombro (Atlantic mackerel, apparently. It was oily.)
Song of the day: Alice DJ - Better Off Alone