‘Voyager 2 and Jan’s Epic Voyage …’ by Ms Paige Turner
Voyager 2 left the Earth over forty-six years ago, in 1977, to travel to our distant ice planets 12.7 billion miles from Earth and collect scientific data. Just recently it has been sending back gobbledygook: maybe it had been knocking back some fine red. Amazingly, it took twenty-two hours for engineers to issue a series of commands rectifying the issue so that the scan platform can resume its function.
I have been recently tempted to knock back any kind of red. For some unbeknown reason Gmail (and subsequently I learn Hotmail is part of this group) have decided to throw all Tiscali emails into Spam. As previously stated, I have never phished for an email in my Internet career: all email addresses from writers have been willingly given to me. What a cauchemar it has been to send all, individually (running to hundreds) of my Gmail recipients an email from my rarely used Gmail account to ask them to find me in Spam, unspam my Tiscali email and add me to their safe senders’ list. Many Gmail recipients do not know where the Spam is, and if located, how to unspam me. I spent one-and-a-half hours on the landline (yes, we still have one) to TalkTalk whom we pay for all our Internet connections including the landline I was on. Every three minutes, someone would come back with, ‘Please hold for three to five minutes.’ The upshot being that my Tiscali line works fine (I knew that as Mr Justin Case gets my emails) and to phone Gmail on this given number: 866 246 6453. It’s an answerphone and no one gets back to you. It appears impossible for either TalkTalk or Gmail to ‘resume my normal function’.
I will say more. This week Mr Justin Case made the decision to keep his keys in the front door lock overnight as an extra precaution against a spate of recent neighbourhood burglaries. We were set for the gym and sitting in the car, he realized that he had left his door keys on the inside lock. I had my keys. They could not turn the front door lock. I had no back door key. We called the first locksmith that we googled: www.locksmiths-ltd.co.uk who sent a locksmith (subsequently we discovered from Wimbledon) to change the patio door lock so that we could gain entry. I was not present on payment as I had pressing matters (like getting to a loo) and my husband was on his own faced with a man with a mighty drill, who charged him £1122 for a thirty-minute job. Unsurprisingly, some several emails to the company DIYBEST ltd, several phone calls to the call centre and locksmith – whom I was told was forbidden to give the director Lukas Sumkas’s telephone number – there has been no response. We have contacted the police, the Trading Standards and the Master Locksmith Association to report this scam. Added to this, we have paid for the patio lock to be changed again at a reasonable rate for obvious reasons, having the leisure to choose our local locksmith with care and without panic.
Do I need to get to the point? Engineers can fix a problem 12.7 billion miles away but local issues seem impossible to solve. To finish this bi-monthly blog, Mr Justin Case wishes Lucas Sumkas and his locksmith could be sent to Voyager 2 …
Luckily, I have a brilliant sound engineer/editor who has finished work on my audio ‘Blackberry Promises’ which will soon go live. (There was a slight issue when uploading but he fixed it within minutes.)
These two books are available on audio and narrated by me.
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Poetry with a Pen and a Passion – Saturday 25th May, Highcrest https://bit.ly/3SGpcvZ
Writing your Memoir/Life Writing – Saturday 8th June, Beaconsfield.
Getting to Grips with the Novel – Saturday 6th July at Gerrards Cross.
Writing for Children – Saturday 9th November. Beaconsfield.