GAAARGH! PEOPLE!!!

I really should have known.

From the very moment somebody said that they would phone me an hour before they were due to arrive, alarm bells ought to have been tripped in my head and I ought to have known that the usual SNAFUs would befall me…

Damn, it’s tricky working full time and having to organise something.

This, you may have already guessed, was all to do with clearing mum’s flat.

The British Heart Foundation had very kindly agreed to take some of the furniture off our hands to sell, and they agreed to come on a particular Monday, but, given the amount of this kind of thing that their volunteers have to do, they couldn’t specify an actual time.

The Beloved had too much work on, and I have a very narrow margin of available days of annual leave to book, so I decided that I might be able to take a couple of hours “personal time” if, as the person on the phone in their office suggested, the charity’s van driver rang me up an hour or so before they were due to arrive and I could haul my sorry donkey over there, let them in, say “bye-bye” to some chunks of my childhood, and get myself back to the office to claw back some time.

So far, so well-planned.

Now, I know that it’s difficult when you’re dealing with volunteers and also with the “Chinese Whispers” effect of getting the message across, but I decided that they seemed on the ball enough, and I prepared myself to be at least another partial step towards a solution.

However, come the glorious day, someone gave them the wrong telephone contact number, and, rather naturally, the whole happy house of cards fell apart. They sat outside calling the wrong number, I sat at work wondering when and whether they’d actually ring at all, whilst chunnering away to anyone who’d listen about simply knowing that the entire plan was bound to fall apart, and, whilst I was doing that, the entire plan, quite naturally, fell apart.

You see, I’ve been here before. Whether its furniture deliveries to my house, or that day when the ex-criminals help scheme came to take our old stuff away, it always seems to take at least two goes to get these things to actually successfully happen, and I really, really, ought to have remembered this when I cockily approached my day actually believing that there was a plan in place and that everything was going to unfold smoothly.

You see, I’ve been told that I worry too much about things that haven’t happened yet, but that if you believe that good things will happen, then they do; That I must embrace the power of positive thinking and believe that things will turn out alright in the end if you allow them to.

Mind you, you know how life can be, get people involved and it all turns to sh*t...

“Best laid plans” and all that, he said, recalling the day mum moved out of her house and was left sitting on a driveway which was no longer hers, surrounded by all of her possessions as the removal company she’d paid up front failed to turn up all day.

Still, I’m sure we’ll get it right at the second attempt, mostly because I have a less convenient “Plan B” which involves me sitting in the flat working remotely and without an internet connection until they turn up, and you can be as sure as eggs is eggs that the nine o’clock start they managed on Monday will somehow drift towards the late afternoon because I’m doing that…

But, whilst like everyone else, “I love it when a plan comes together…” life does like to throw us all these little curve balls whenever we believe anything ought to be fairly simple and straightforward.

Like my recent experiences of trying to get some life insurance organised.

Now a letter has arrived and the mysterious “them” want to send someone “to my house” (where I’d rather not be given the holiday situation I described earlier) and “at my convenience” (which it won’t be) to take a urine sample to prove I’m going to live long enough to not have to make any sort of claim against the policy.

Are they taking the piss?

Anyway, I don’t want to take yet another of my limited days off to wait indoors all day for someone to fail to appear and ask me to get my tackle out and pee into a bottle, presumably in front of them to witness it, but I suppose that I’ll have to if I want to get covered.

This was because I was daft enough to be honest when I was filling out the application in the bank.

I'm not a “smoker”.

I've never been “a smoker”.

But, on occasion, when very, very drunk, and very much younger than I now am, I used to blag the occasional gasper at the end of an evening’s beer drinking from whoever was handy because my boundaries were collapsing due to being under the influence of either alcohol or smoke-addled minds who wanted me to join them and whom I presumably was trying to impress for whatever reason (possibly involving potential subsequent pant investigations which rarely came to pass).

This information, give or take a detail or two, I readily offered up during my chats at the bank and, because the banks are now so very “squeaky-clean” about absolutely everything nowadays, he felt that he couldn’t check the “Never Smoked” box, hence the announcement of the imminent arrival of some mysterious healthcare professional to check my “non-smoker” status…

Presumably they’ll arrive, at  the very least, at the second attempt…

Let’s hope my own aim is more of a “first time” thing, eh…?