Monday, January 24, 2005
All downhill after thirty?
Yesterday was the first day of my thirties, and apparently senility is already setting in. Or (since I think I nearly left my handbag somewhere this fall and only Grash's alertness prevented the disaster, and I left a wallet on the bus in Vancouver in 1996) it could be that increased age is not adding to my paltry stock of wisdom. Fortunately I'm still occasionally lucky. This is what happened:
Around 7:40 I caught the train to Bristol Temple Meads, but it ran late so I missed the connecting train to Filton Abbey Wood I'd normally take. I waited in one of the customer lounges for 15 minutes for the next one, reading the Economist. Half-way between Temple Meads and FAW I suddenly realised I only had my backpack, and not my handbag. I actually gave a little gasp and put my hand over my mouth. Mentally retracing the morning so far, I'd left it either in the customer lounge or on the train I'd caught to Temple Meads, now headed back towards Severn Beach.
The handbag contained my wallet, and my antibiotics for my stupid cold-from-last-weekend's-trip-to-Prague-turned-into-sinus-infection, and the letter with my new National Insurance number (recorded nowhere else), and my passport, and my phone and my keys and pretty much my entire life. I'd just put my credit card, bank card and 80 quid back in the wallet this morning from the small bag I'd had with me during the birthday celebrations Saturday night. So I was full of self-recrimination and foreboding about the size of Stupid Tax (TM) I'd be paying. I ran from the train station to work (the one thing not in the purse was my work ID) so that I could make some calls and try to track it down.
The train's lost and found property phone people are spectacularly unhelpful. They won't even take your number so that they can call you if your stuff shows up. Nothing gets into their tracking system for 48 hours. And no one answered my mobile when I called it to try to short-cut the whole finding it process. So I took the train back to Temple Meads station where the bag was likely to end up if anyone turned it in. It wasn't in the customer lounge, nor in the lost property area. I took the train back to work, stopping to cancel my NatWest bank card on the way.
Back at my desk, I called to put a hold on my VISA, then checked my email. I discovered that just after I'd hopped on the train back to work the second time the guy who found my handbag turned it in and called Grash and Andrew (using my phone's numbers, for he was clever) to let them know if they could reach me that it was safe. I went back to the train station yet again, picked up my handbag, and was back at work at 11, having arrived there the first time at 8:45. Then I called to unfreeze my VISA.
That probably burnt through my luck for the week, so I'm going to be super attentive in Sweden this coming weekend.
In other news:
a) I've decided I'm moving back to Vancouver once my internship's done in March. Possibly more on this later.
and
b) I went to Prague the weekend of the 15th. I took lots of pictures and enjoyed architecture and alcohol and andel's. Definitely more on this later.
