The true measure of irony?

I’m a LoveFilm subscriber and I wanted to rent Public Enemies.  However, it’s not been available on LoveFilm since it was released, always listed as just unavailable for rent.  Keep that in mind.  I have four lists on LoveFilm, Movies, TV, Wish List and Comedy.  Movies are stuff we want LoveFilm to send right now and likewise TV is the list we use to get the next disc in whatever TV series we’re watching.  The Wish List and Comedy lists have no discs next to them – so LoveFilm doesn’t dispatch anything from those lists.  They’re reminders of things we might want.

Back to the first point.  I wrote to LoveFilm to ask them why they didn’t have Public Enemies.  They replied and said they were having issues with their supplier, sounds like bollocks but okay, fair enough.  They also said, here have a free disc! Cool I thought, although let’s face it, it doesn’t cost them any money.

So I checked, and there was no sign of my new disc allocation.  And I waited.  I wanted to put the new disc next to the Movies list so they sent something to watch.

Later that day I received an e-mail telling me they’d dispatched something, but it was something from the Wish List.  Disappointing I thought.  Because I was sure you were supposed to be able to pick where the free disc came from, and I assumed I’d just missed something.

Anyway, I sent them another mail to thank them but say that it was a little frustrating that they had dispatched something without letting me pick the list, since the Wish List they used isn’t something I wanted a movie from right at that moment.

They replied, they were very sorry, to compensate me for my trouble they had given me a free disc!

Which I had no way of allocating to a particular list that I could find.

And so they dispatched something else I don’t really want to watch from the Wish List.

I believe this, my friends, is the true definition of irony (in combination with a battery powered battery power checker they make a wonderful couple).

I have the power!

If, like us, you buy batteries for stuff and then forget, or you take batteries out of something and put them on a shelf, or you somehow end up with batteries from you’re not quite sure where, then you’ll eventually end up with a box / tub / draw full of batteries.  None of which you’re sure work.  When the remote control / guitar hero guitar / doorbell / smoke alarm then stops working and you put batteries in and it still doesn’t work you’re never sure if it’s the batteries or the device.  I mean, those batteries could have been standing there for months, or they could even be the ones you took out last time it stopped working.

I finally decided to buy a battery testing device so I could check the several million batteries we have lying around and see if any of them are any good.  As is normal these days, I spent about 11 minutes checking the reviews on Amazon and bought a device which got the least bad reviews.  It was pretty cheap so I wasn’t expecting anything built to last, but if it saves us a few quid buying new batteries then job done.  It has a little LCD display which indicates the charge left in the battery you’re testing and it tests like every single battery size known to man.

When it arrived, I was amazed to discover the device is the very definition of irony.  It takes a single AAA battery to operate it.  So, if you put a battery in to test, and the battery in the device is dead, you don’t know if the device is dead or your battery is dead.  And you can’t test the AAA battery, because, your battery test device isn’t working.  Ad infinitum.

Maybe I need a backup battery testing kit with an emergency known-working AAA battery to test the battery of my battery testing kit in the event that a large number of batteries I’m testing don’t work and I start getting nervous.

I guess they could have avoided this issue by including a ‘self test’ mode on the device, but they didn’t.  Still, it has proven that 1/4 of the batteries we had are virtually dead, another 1/4 are ‘okay’ and the others seem pretty good.

of protein and fat and blood sugar

Approaching two hours after finishing my breakfast, and my blood sugar is 6 mmol/L.  I had 3 hash browns and 4 slices of white bread (although they were half-loaf sized) and a lot of beans.  But I also had sausage, bacon and fried eggs, a solid mix of protein and fat.  That protein and fat ensures my body metabolises the carbohydrates more slowly.  If I’d had four slices a toast only with low fat spread, the ‘healthier’ option, or even some regular cereal, my blood sugar would be up in the high 8’s or 9’s at this point.

The irony doesn’t escape me.

Still, here’s to blood sugar levels of 6 mmol/L and a Merry Christmas ahead.