Symi internet is sometimes (rubbish)
Don’t you just hate it when things you pay good money for don’t do what you were told they would do? It’s the old and thorny subject of the internet connection on Symi again. It may be to do with hubs and areas and all that kind of thing, but ours yesterday got me to the point of wanting to phone up Cosmote and give them an ear bashing of very ungentlemanly proportions – as has been done (politely I should add) in the past. Trying to get anything done online around here sometimes is like trying to run backwards up cliff.

I can imagine the company putting out a message to its Symi customers, something like:

“Your internet connection, that you pay so many Euros for each month and which we promise to give you at, in your case, 4 Mbps, 24 hours a day, will be working for some of the time but, just for fun, we have arranged to have it cut out and go off at the time most inconvenient to you. We won’t warn you about that or be specific, apart from to say, ‘it’ll happen whenever it feels like it.’ We prefer to take you by surprise. Perhaps when you are half way through a Skype call to your agent, or when you are at the last few moments of an episode of ‘House of Cards’ on Netflix, we will simply get the signal to drop out and leave you wondering.” They would then go on:

“As an added bonus, because you are such a loyal customer, having had an account with us for over 12 years now and having never failed to pay a bill on time, we will reward you with some non-drop-out time. At these times you will be able to connect to the internet and find the whizzy super-fast speed that we promised you (a huge 4 Mbps) is actually running at 0.3 Mbps which, as you will know because you are also an astute customer, is slower than the good old days of dial-up. We are offering this service as you are a valued customer.”

And then go on:

“However, if you feel that you are not getting the service we have agreed with you in our contract (4 Mbps for around €30.00 per month) then please feel free to call our helpline. An assistant there will check our end of the system and tell you that everything is fine and has been fixed and there is nothing wrong with the line – you are calling us on your phone after all. If this still does not satisfy (and it is doubtful that it will), then we advise you call the technical people and repeatedly tell them that there is a fault somewhere and you are not getting the service you pay for. They won’t believe you of course and will pass you back to the original call centre where a helpful lady will tell you that there is no fault at our end. In this case we suggest you unplug everything and start again from scratch (again). If that still does not work, then we suggest you try and find another provider. Oh, we forgot, you can’t, not easily, as we have the monopoly on your island. Well, it’s only a small out of the way place anyway, so we are not really worried. Have a nice day.”

Thank you, got that out of my system while waiting for the internet connection to come back on after its 4^th time of doing down in one morning, without warning. Assuming that it comes back on between now and the next time I do a blog post, you should get to read this. Oh, you just did, didn’t you? Sorry, I wasn’t paying attention, I had a tin can stuck to my ear and was listening to a recorded call centre operative at CosmOte via a piece of string. [Looks at view and Neil’s photos and calms down.]

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Grey skies and rams
Woke up on Monday morning to clouds and the aftermath of a thunderstorm, which I slept through thanks to my earplugs. I usually put them in for the cat, I mean so I don’t have to listen to his singing at night and alarm calls in the morning. He has a habit of using his litter tray and then shouting at it for five minutes, as if it had done him wrong. That’s all very well, but he likes to use it at Ungodly O’clock in the morning and I don’t need to listen to that.

So, I missed the rain pouring down on the roof, the overflow flowing over into the lane outside the bedroom window, and the thunder that was rattling around. I even missed the alarm clock. That is left out in the hallway so someone has to get out of bed to switch it off; you can only ignore it for so long. There had been no rain coming into the house which is a good thing, of course, and the plants had themselves a good watering. The sky in the morning still carried heavy clouds and a certain amount of rain, so I went up onto the roof to take a look at the view and found this chap watching me from up the lane.

It’s great at this time of year as you find yourself sitting there watching TV and then wonder what that sound is… A herd of sheep bleats it way past your window, even though we are not particularly rural where we are now. We all know, too, that the silence of the lambs will soon be upon us, around Big Friday in forty or so days’ time.

A quick mention of earthquakes as it came up the other day. Neil felt a tremor from the sitting room but I was in the kitchen and felt nothing. A couple of people have asked for a good site to check earthquakes up on and the one I use is here: http://www.geophysics.geol.uoa.gr/stations/maps/recent.html This site lists all recorded earth tremors and, if you look, you should see the one we had on Saturday at 15:44 (GMT). It was 4.1 and between Rhodes and Symi. But it’s nothing to be worried about, just our grumbling off-shore volcano I expect. Apparently there is something like that half way between Turkey and Rhodes and if it should ever surface, we are all expecting a great rush to see who claims it for their country. A few years ago now we had a November full of tremors, five or six noticeable ones in a day, at times. We probably have hundreds each day as old Mother Earth tries to get comfortable, but you don’t notice them unless they are very close to the surface, nearby, or big. Anyway, that site is run by the University of Athens Faculty of Geology, so it’s the one I trust most for local quake news. But, as I say, don’t worry about them; we’ve not had a biggie down here for many years. (2008 was the most recent fatal one, where one person died after they ran from their house and tripped over – this was not on Symi but further north in the Dodecanese chain. So, don’t panic!)

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Start of Lent in Greece
It’s the start of Lent today in Greece, and the day is usually marked with picnics and kite flying and clearing out the foods you’re not supposed to eat for the next 40 days. That’s why it’s called Clean Monday, I guess. I was chatting to an Orthodox lady on Saturday who told me that the first week of the fast was hard as it’s literally only vegetables and seafood (with no blood), not even oil. I like salads but having one without pickle or mayonnaise would be, for me, a step beyond the call of duty. The same regime applies to the end of the fast but the weeks in between, apparently are a little easier.

I am actually writing this on Sunday, as I do, so I have no idea what the state of weather-play is going to be tomorrow (today), though rain is forecast, which won’t be fun for the barbeques. But then, so it was today and, so far, there has been no sign of rain. The sky is a bit grey, the sea is a bit windswept by not white, so hopefully by the time you read this, any bad weather would have passed and everyone who is celebrating with a seafood barbie will be having a good time.

Also, at the weekend, the ‘cinema’ was showing an old favourite (see below). I wonder if anyone dressed up and got into the part? ‘Pan it, Janet!’ and all that. Sunday was also carnival day, the last blast before Lent starts. Children and some grown-up children have already been out and about in costume, scaring people with elaborate rubber face masks; old crones, warty women, politicians, you know the sort of thing.

Another piece of news for you is that later this year Neil will be bring out next year’s Symi calendar, as he does, but will also be bringing out a cat calendar, with images of local cats. This is a popular subject for calendars, there are hundreds of them every year, but hopefully this one will have some Symi appeal too. Here’s an example: a young cat camping out among the chains by the harbour anchors.

And as for me this week, well, I won’t be fasting or even giving up anything for Lent as that’s not what I do, but I will be working on the Donkeys book, my scriptwriting course and hopefully my typing as I try and advance from the first row of letters to the next. Apart from that, it looks like it is going to be a quiet week ahead. Famous last words?

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Symi! (Exclamation mark, why?)
Photos of some more plants in the courtyard, clouds and sun, calmer winds, cool breeze, just another ordinary day for me on Symi.

I spent a lot of Wednesday night watching ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and making notes. I then spent Thursday morning typing them up, a total of over 800 words, but I only need 500 for the assignment, which is about the script of a film. In this case SPR. After the note typing came the sifting and sorting and moving things around so that I had a structure to my piece, and then came some editing. As I pause to write this, I have 640 words. I need to hone it down to 500 or less without losing any of my main points. It’s been a while since I did anything remotely academic, even though this isn’t relay an academic exercise, and, so far I am quite enjoying it. I think. I’ll leave it for now though and come back to it later or tomorrow and see what I have written. Hopefully I will like it.

And talking of films. Is it me or does every film these days have to have someone throw up in it? Even some animated stories have someone doing something nasty with fluids from the head; spitting, hoiking, gobbing, vomiting, you name it they all seem to do it. The number of times I’ve watched a film and seen something like that going on seems to be on the increase. Yes, I know, ‘keep it visceral’ and ‘make it realistic’ and all that, so when someone sees a dead body there’s usually a stomach reaction. But in every single film? Okay, I’ve not seen it in Love Story and a quick up-chuck would be out of place in ‘Women In Love’ (perhaps not), but they are old films. These days it’s everywhere! Even in TV shows!

And I must apologise for the overzealous use of that exclamation mark! Oops, did it again. I hate them and think they should be banned which, as far as I can pick up, means I am close to being in agreement with someone in the British Government. You have to admit, though, that when someone writes Hi! It works and that’s fine, so we won’t outlaw the ! completely. Or when someone shouts, ‘OI! Come over here,’ it makes sense. But what I hate is when people write to you and say things like, How are you! (Should be a question mark.) Or, We’re coming to visit Symi in two months! As if were an announcement of ‘Quick, run for the hills!’ Or even worse, We have now taken delivery of three new kittens!!! (One for each mini-moggy, I guess.) In every novel of, say, 80,000 words, I say that there should be no more than four exclamation marks. They don’t give sentences any more weight, especially if overused. If you want to show surprise or joy, write ‘I am surprised, or joyful.’

I have no idea where that came from, but then I rarely have any idea where these morning posts come from. But still, it’s there now! (Stop it!) (No, really.)

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