Bugger Brother

How long has it been since the beginning of term? Yep, two weeks, give or take. My eldest's school bag tore across the top in the middle of last week. Was I cross? You bet.

So I took it back to Intermarché today. No till receipt, natch. I bought it some three weeks ago, and don't keep supermarket receipts that long. I was expecting, after all, that the bag would last ten months, not two weeks.

A guard was lurking around the customer service counter so I went up to him and told him about the bag and how unimpressed I was. Did he care? Not in the slightest. All he did was to ask me if I had the till receipt to which I said no, but that I wanted Intermarché to contact the supplier to complain about the crappy quality of their bags.

This was obviously not in his job description, so he advised me to go and see the lady on till one, who happened to be on till three (are you keeping up here?). When I showed her the bag, she tut tutted sympathetically and called some geezer.

I suppose he was some sort of manager, so I told him all about the bag, and he, guess what... asked me for my till receipt. I told him I didn't have it, I knew I didn't have it but I wanted him to give the supplier a bollocking. I then told him that because of his supplier selling me a crappy bag, I was going to take my custom to Carrefour to do my entire week's shop there. This was potentially a lot of money - he's not to know I had done a big shop last week, and only needed to top up... and I stalked off to his apologies wailing plaintively in my ears.

My youngest and I then tackled shopping - bleh - and I came back determined to print off 200 odd pages of my book with the generic cartridges I had had delivered, eventually, from Toner Services (.com). Can you imagine my fury when I fitted the new cartridge in, could see it sitting there all sparkly new and full, and yet the printer (Brother) flatly refused to acknowledge its existence? Not only that, but when I plonked the old Brother one back in, it told me repeatedly that there was no cartridge inserted.

Conclusion? Printer buggered.

I was trying not to grind my teeth to powder, but really, it's a disgrace! I then had to take my youngest to a footie tournament for the afternoon: won 3, lost 1; after which I had to dash into Darty to buy a new sodding printer (HP). The cartridges are nearly 18Eur a piece. I used a whole one to print off the two hundred pages... You can see why I wanted to try generic cartridges, which cost a mere 7Eur, but I wasn't expecting to have to fork out another eighty odd for a new printer! My book has 389 pages to date. That makes printing it a luxury, and way pricier than the cost of a printed book with cover, photos, interview, review bites and kitchen sink.

Actually, come to think of it, you have to be quite rich to write a book in this day and age. I definitely must not give up the day job yet!