What I did on Friday

I spent half of my Friday cursing Itella (the Finnish postal service).

First of all I cursed it for the fact that it always takes two days to send anything, from a small postcard to a large package, from Vasa to Helsinki even though they kind of promise that it will only take one day.

Then I cursed it’s bosses for being incompetent fools to have started to downsize the company, closing down half of all the post-offices in our fine country. This will of course only give Itella more trouble since people aren’t even able to send letters anymore. Instead we rely more and more on the ever present R-Kioski who now sells stamps and distribute packages from H&M. (Here I spent some time thanking God for R-Kioski and it’s more than competent bosses.)

After going to the post-office with the one and only bus that can take me there, I started cursing Multitronic. (This was not until I had cursed Itella some more for not even being open on a lousy Saturday, forcing me to go there on Friday even though I still had a temperature.)

At the post-office I namely noticed that the said package that I would receive from Multitronic wasn’t actually a package but a letter! They had just put the “package” label on it, forcing the post to make me come and pick it up and sign for it. (And yes, as you may have noticed, Itella brings nothing heavier than 50g to your doorstep.)

The cursing of Multitronic continued into the evening.

When I opened the “package” I found the case to my harddrive. Multitronic had sent my harddrive two weeks ago but forgotten to send my case. So two phone-calls later I finally had the case in my hand – even the right case - things were looking a bit better…

But after putting together the new harddrive and the case and plugging it to my computer, I found that the problem I had had two months ago was still very much present in that I had no way to access the harddrive. The new harddrive was totally worthless and if I wanted a third one I would probably have to wait another two months. Cursing continued.

Then I read a very refreshing chapter from the book “Birds without wings” by Louis de Bernières. Here a man named Georgio P. Theodorou is cursing the men in charge of the war between Greece and Turkey (year ca 1920). He is doing so while drowning after being chased out into the sea by a mob of Turkish soldiers. He, and his fellow Greek/Christian countrymen were hoping that the Greek battleships in the harbour would send out people to rescue them from this horrible death, which they obviously neglected to do. So here he is drowning and cursing, not only the Turkish side, but maybe mostly the incompetent leader of the Greek army.

And I came to the conclusion that at least the incompetent leaders of Itella aren’t causing my death.

 This book is actually quite nice – a bit long, but nice. It makes you think about how easy it is to one day call your neighbour your friend and the next day kill him for no good reason at all. And it also made me understand Vassileios a bit better when understanding that the Greek empire and the Greek-Orthodox religion might have screwed with people’s heads a bit.