Comic Cuts — 12 March 2021

Where to start...

Last Thursday I had a phone call from our local surgery asking if I wanted to book an appointment to have the Covid vaccine, and I almost leapt down the phoneline to hug my doctor. I wasn't expecting to hear from them for maybe another month and brings me a step closer to being able to see my family. (My Mum and I "celebrated" our six month-iversary in late February and it has been over a year since she saw my sister.)

The only negative was that the jab wouldn't be administered at our local surgery, but at a surgery in neighbouring Brightlingsea, two towns over down the Colne and a twenty-or-so minute bus ride away. I like early appointments to get things done and dusted as quick as possible, so I Googled the time table and found an early bus that left at 8:54 and arrived at 9:15. I said, "Give me fifteen minutes to find my way around as I've never been to Brightlingsea," and we booked the appointment for 9:30am on Saturday.

When I stepped out of the house on Saturday morning, I felt 100% prepared: I was taking my tablet which had bus timetables, a stitched together Google map of the route the bus would take so I knew when we were getting into this strange town, and a note of where I would be dropped off (Vernon Place) in relation to where the surgery was. By coincidence, I was catching a bus outside the local Co-Op and the surgery was opposite the Co-Op in Brightlingsea.

Things started to go wrong straight away. I was greeted at the bus stop with a stuck-on hand-scrawled message that there would be no buses running between Wivenhoe and Brightlingsea UNTIL APRIL!!!

The advice offered was to leave Wivenhoe, head out to the university and catch a bus from there. Fortunately, a bus running in the opposite direction to where I wanted to go came along soon after and I was able to get to the university, switch buses to one I needed and got into Brightlingsea and the surgery only twenty-five minutes late.

I was told that the vaccine had some side effects. A friend had her vaccine on Friday, and was almost unable to make our regular Saturday evening zoom game session, so I knew what I had in store. I barely slept on Saturday night and was feeling under the weather on Sunday, having flu-like symptoms. On Monday I was feeling jet-lagged due to the lack of sleep a day earlier, but I was feeling fine by Tuesday. My arm still ached from where they had given the vaccine, but otherwise I'm back to normal.

Just as I'm starting to feel good, our internet starts playing up. About ten or eleven on Tuesday morning, our internet stopped working. Less of a problem for me, as I was sorting out scans for an upcoming book, but a big problem for Mel, who was in the middle of proofing and correcting a magazine for the company she works for. She arranged for a mobile wi-fi hub to be delivered from work so that she could keep working and I managed to borrow it briefly on Wednesday evening, allowing me to put up a message on Facebook and Twitter.

It pegged out almost immediately because working on pages via the internet eats through data at an alarming rate and we only discovered what the problem was on Friday morning. It meant Mel had to set up her computer at her place of work, having travelled in by taxi, so that she was able to use their wi-fi and finish the work she needed to in order to sign off the magazine.

In the meantime, we had heard that an engineer had been out to the exchange and had sorted out the problem, whatever it was. Because Mel was working from home, we had left Talk Talk with her mobile number, so she received a text. I, on the other hand, was sent an e-mail which said that the connection might take a couple of days to "adjust". If, the mail continued, there were further issues after two days, "please go to your online service centre where you can chat to our support team."

Remember, they're fixing our internet connection because our internet connection isn't working. So for starters, I didn't receive the message, nor would I have been able to go anywhere online if the problem wasn't resolved.

As it was, our internet connection returned around 2:30 pm on Thursday after about 52 hours offline. And one of the first things I did was post this to twitter:

Warner's decision to broadcast DUNE on HBO Max forces Denis Volleneuve to

cut back on the special effects budget for DUNE 2 …

This is what happens when I'm kept away from the internet and have to entertain myself...//twitter.co