This memorial contains almost a month’s worth of parts – though not all of ‘em are about electronics! – and the post you’re reading is the third in the series.
In the final days of December I organised to have the internet connected at my new home, and in early January went searching for the modem that’d been sent. An email from Australia Post told me it’d arrived at my address but in November I’d put in a postal redirect so now thought it possible that the device might instead go to my PO box. But, no! I drove to Mascot post office where a woman told me the device’d been delivered to Pyrmont, so I headed over there and the man in the post office on Harris Street firmly advised me about a customer service number.
My misgivings due to the fact that I’d tried it before but found it hard to use: you’ve got to pronounce aloud a long tracking number and, if that doesn’t work, you’ve got to punch the number into your phone for the benefit of the machine on their side. But you can’t remember the whole number! And by the time you’ve returned to your browser from your email client the machine’s accepted a partial number as the whole of it so it rejects your enquiry. So I tried using the contact number once more, finally getting through to an operator, who told me the package’d be retrieved and sent to my post office box, but that this’d take five days.
In the meantime I’d contacted the estate agent who sold my place and asked him. Tom told me that the purchaser was away and would be back on 13 January – so this’d be the earliest I could get my modem. The NBN guy was due to come on the 21st (I’d tried to get an earlier date, but it’d been impossible) and as a result, from the 5th until at least the 21st I’d have to use a mobile hotspot on my phone to connect to the internet. On one occasion I got this device set up using WiFi but after that the iP4one wouldn’t appear in the menu on my PC’s network finder so instead I resorted to using a cable. I tried troubleshooting the problem but nothing I did fixed it and in the end gave up trying to use wireless for the link-up.
On 6 January I had someone working for Joe (the owner/builder) come to install the washing machine but the inlet hoses were too short so I drove to Bunnings and bought suitable ones, then left them in the house while I went out to look at furniture with friends. When I came home the washing machine was – I thought (erroneously, as it turned out) – connected and installed. The next day I went to Harvey Norman in Kensington and bought a clothes dryer as the old one’d been left in my apartment when I’d sold. This time I bought a heat-pump model instead of the regular type that forces hot air through your clothes. The heat pump type apparently has advantages in terms of care for clothes, and it is also quieter and less gusty! On the 8th after it was delivered by two large Anglo boys I tried turning on the washing machine but it refused to start. I called my appliance repair guy but he didn’t answer the phone so I went to bed without a fix. The next morning I called him again and he answered but said that LG wasn’t supplying motherboards anymore so he wouldn’t be able to fix the device. He suggested he might be able to get someone else to help, so I agreed for him to ask and rang off. Then I got onto the LG website and started a live chat, talking with “Gwen” who asked, at the beginning of the conversation, if I’d checked the electrical supply by plugging the machine into another outlet. I said, “No, the house is new and the socket is fine” – which would in the event turn out to be completely wrong.
We began discussing the problem and a cause so I got the model and serial numbers from the sticker near the front of the machine and “Gwen” asked me if I could source a receipt from Harvey Norman. This request stumped me as I’d have to wait until 10.30am when the store opened to call them to ask for one. Eventually “Gwen” said she’d go ahead with the information I’d given (the machine was made in May 2017, so it was covered by the 10-year warranty) and she said later that a technician would call me on the 15th. I asked if I’d need to wait a week for the service and she said that was when the company would get in touch with me; it was the earliest slot available.
Later the same day, the service firm did call me but, perplexed by the delay – I was stuck with a week’s worth of dirty clothes – I went to the laundry and packed things in an old Ikea bag preparatory to going to a coin laundromat, then on a whim moved the washing machine out of its bay and plugged it into the dryer’s socket.
It turned on. I went upstairs and told Joe about the fault and he said the electrician would be coming on Tuesday (12 Jan) and to remind him (Joe) on that day that the socket was faulty. “It could be a wiring issue can be easily resolved,” he wrote in WhatsApp. I thought dejectedly about how I’d broken my Topolscanyi vase then drove to Stanmore. It cost $9 for the wash and $4 for the drying – plus $2 because one dryer was faulty, which made me lose two coins – with parking free on the street.
It was a useful trip as I winged it without navigational aids and arrived, following the previous day’s outing to Enmore, along roads servicing the new motorway. It’s a 10-minute drive outside peak hours and I felt like a local for the first time since visiting the Botany house the previous July. I also felt like a local when, on 6 January, I walked over to Service NSW to get my driver’s license renewed. I’d fortunately already updated my residential and mailing addresses on a NSW government website. The gentleman who served me was efficient (the poor man had a bloody nose from wearing a mask all the time). A 50 percent fee applied in my case due to my sound record.
On 10 January I decided to do some ironing – for three months I’d gone without this chore so there was novelty in a return to it – for about a dozen clean shirts. It took two reservoirs’-full of water to do all of them. The next day I unpacked the boxes for the bathroom, which included my Wahl beard trimmer, now reunited with its charger.
The doorbell sounded at 7.30am on the morning of 13 January and when I let the plumber in we walked upstairs. He assessed the laundry and connected the outlet pipe to what he thought was the correct spot on the dryer and fed it into the tundish (an open pipe my air-conditioner outlet feeds into) under the sink. Then he took the trap off the drain and emptied the water out of it using one of the bathrooms on the first floor. Outside, in the street, he drilled a hole in a spigot on the trap (there are two spigots, both of which sat on blind sections of pipe) then came back inside the house and reattached it to the drain and connected the washing machine outlet to it using a metal clamp.
In the late afternoon I was talking with Joe and Cameron – my next-door neighbour – in the carpark and he mentioned that he wanted to get the electrician – slated to be on-site on Saturday – to put an extra power point in the living room. I mentioned that I’d like more power points in my bedroom to accommodate appliances associated with my computer, which is stationed there. I thought about the conversation afterward and later messaged Joe asking if he could put a power point in the back bedroom on the first floor to service a desk I’d placed beside the door.
On 15 January he phoned to tell me, while I was busy with friends (see photo below) escaping from a room, about the job’s completion. (An escape room requires the resolution of a series of puzzles – often involving equipment or devices – and has a time limit. We did one on this day but didn’t manage to get out in the allowed period; you get an hour to complete.)
When I got back from Wollongong I put on my first load of laundry and then used the dryer – which leaked (see photo below) – so I phoned Joe and he came over. We attached the correct part – a small double adaptor with spigots on both ends and a right-angle – to link the outlet pipe with the extension going to the tundish. Luckily the leak didn’t escape the laundry – the floor is cambered to draw excess water to the drain at the centre so there was no damage to the floorboards in the hallway – but the episode sent my pulse up.
In the end it took eight different people to correctly configure the laundry:
- Adam the builder told me to get longer (2m) washing machine inlet hoses that he then connected to the wall taps
- Me driving to Bunnings to get the inlet hoses
- Me in the car to buy Electrolux heat pump dryer at Harvey Norman in Kensington
- Two guys with a truck to deliver same the next day
- A-Style Plumbing to drill the hole in the drain trap for the washing machine outlet hose
- Same person to lead the dryer’s outlet hose to the tundish
- “Gwen” at LG to set up a service call (which turned out not to be necessary)
- Electrician to fix the power point behind appliances
- Joe to apply double adaptor to connect the extension pipe to the dryer’s outlet hose
Enough for a Norse saga! For me it was a relief to learn, on 16 January, that – at home – I could do laundry without causing a flood and that any water that might emerge onto the laundry floor wouldn’t damage my hallway. Just as it was by driving to Stanmore through St Peters that I felt like a local, I only felt like a resident of the house I’d moved into after I could safely and reliably do a load of laundry.
Clothes maketh the man – feel at home.
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Twitter accounts form a virtual version of garments and on 16 January I reconnected the Book Chat Oz account to my Twitter page. By the end of this bout of reorganisation I’d set up two new blogs and two more Twitter accounts, each dedicated to a different subject. The new regime was well established on 23 January, a day when, by turns, using the native Twitter page as my compass (an indicator shows if a linked account has new notifications), I started toggling between accounts. I can now connect with more people and engage in a variety of conversations through different personae. In fact, because I was using dedicated, themed accounts I could also now follow more people. And, because people could see the purpose associated with each account, I was gaining followers more rapidly.
At the outset rather than liberating it was confusing. You have to remember, as you’re reading, “Who am I supposed to be right now?” and the urge to control became imperilled after I started the new blogs: by the time I reached the end of January I had four blogs as well as five accounts – the number five being the limit to what Twitter allows you to link up:
- One for rural and agriculture stories,
- One for literature and writing,
- One for Aboriginal and First Nations issues,
- One for politics, and
- The main, @mattdasilva account.
When using TweetDeck (owned by the Twitter company) I’d see the browser tab freeze and refresh jerking, by turns, from a stuck screen with a message notifying me of the application’s need to log out (to prevent unauthorised access) to a blue screen with a cycling “wait” icon and, next, a new page. This would happen each time I changed the account in focus at the native Twitter screen, which became my navigational control point.
While this configuration’d confront me, as the interface operator, with a few challenges – I might put up a link to the wrong blogpost, and put up a link to a blog not associated with the current Twitter account (and in fact I did this, disconcertingly, on 16 February) – the new regime gave access to more hashtags and more conversations. It was easier to avoid frustration and boredom, so the quality of the conversations was better than when just limited to one account.
Because, when you tune into it, each hashtag occupies, in TweetDeck, a separate column, you can only watch so many hashtags at any one time before your view necessarily slips beyond the edges of the browser window and, if you want to see more, you’ve got to use the mouse to scroll alternately right or left. Such a mode of usage, obviously, is not desirable because it’s clumsy. Using multiple accounts – each with, say, three tuned-in hashtags – you can monitor a larger number of feeds and stay current with a wider range of events and issues, all the while actively accumulating followers and emitting “likes”.
For the politics account I’d skew toward a sharp form of humour, not neglecting, on occasion, irony or, even, sarcasm. For the literary account, on the other hand, I’d “like” heartfelt poems people’d put into my feed – associated with, say, the #poetry hashtag – and commiserate with their feelings of sadness (if that’s what the poem dealt with). My main account was usually to communicate with people who followed me, and whom I followed.
The variety of responses that was now open to me was more than liberating, at times I actually felt free to engage with people in new ways, while at other times I toggled busily, watching events unfold and monitoring when people would respond in some way – it might be a “like” or a (more rarely) a retweet – to something I’d posted, or I’d use one interface or another as though I were not one person, but many people assembled in a single body. This is not so far away from how each of us deals with life on a daily basis and must be how the Supreme Creator – up there, in the clouds, next to a mountain where social-medialess ancestors dwell – keeps track of souls, multiplying His will though a convenient celestial interface allowing Him to attend to the destinies of a multitude of individual lives.
Like in that Jim Carrey film.
About the modem: Tom called me in mid-January and we agreed for him to come over on the Monday before the NBN guy’d come to deliver it but that day he said he hadn’t yet collected the device. He SMS’d me on 20 January, saying that he might be able to pick it up the following day but by that time I’d SMS’d him to say I’d be in Pyrmont that morning. He phoned me a little later telling me to go to the building and to buzz the new occupants of my old apartment, who left the package and some letters in the lobby so that I could pick them up.
I spoke with Joe after – at my prompting – he offered to get Adam, a handyman – an adept with a van and a cache of tools, some specialised, some broadly applicable – to install a Hills clothesline out the back of my place, on the deck. Adam told me to go to Bunnings to buy the thing, which I did on the morning of 17 January, on which day, with his apprentice, he turned up so we set about assembling and installing the device.
One bolt was missing so I dove into the car and again went to Bunnings where at the door a woman directed me to the information desk. The woman stationed there made some calls and identified a helper, then pointed me to where, in the store, he could be found. I walked past the registers and a man in an aisle took my receipt, leading me upstairs in the lift. On the first floor we went to the appropriate aisle and he opened a box – like the one, in the morning, I’d taken to my car – took a bolt out of an unopened plastic bag sitting inside, and handed it to me. After showing it to the woman from the information desk I went back to my car.
When I got home I put the bolt into the assembled clothesline. The photo above shows the clothesline in use for the first time on 23 January after doing a full load of washing. Even with that much clothing the small rack is barely half-full.
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On 19 January, because it wasn’t turning on properly, I took my beside lamp back to the Ashfield store I’d bought it from just over a year before. I should’ve taken a cue from my experience with the washing machine because at the shop the device functioned perfectly so, when I got back home, in a message to Joe, I noted that another power point wasn’t working. When he came over to inspect it, however, the lamp worked ok and likewise the next day when I took it back to the shop. Stumped, in Leichhardt I drank a flat white at Bar Italia and used my phone to search for nearby shops. I found and visited two lighting retailer, at the second one putting a down payment on a Taiwanese lamp without a touch function (instead, the LED model has a small toggle switch on the base). An email from the store arrived, once I got home, in the afternoon, and at about 2pm the next day an SMS came telling me the lamp was ready to pick up, which is what I eventually got around to doing a week later on the Monday before the certifier’s second-but-one inspection.
Telling me he’d be at my place in about 30 minutes, at 3pm on 21 January the NBN guy phoned me and when he turned up buzzed the doorbell. I had a word with him as he stood at the gate, then went inside to unpack the modem and plug it in. The provider called me at about 4.50pm and since the NBN technician was still on-site I asked the telephone consultant – a woman – to call me back. The technician came up from the basement, where he’d been installing the NBN for the whole row of terraces, and got the modem working, but when I went upstairs to my bedroom – where my PC and desk are – the signal wasn’t strong enough to reach.
At 5pm the provider, supposed to call me back, lodged no call. They never made one so I got in touch with a staffer who told me to get a booster at JB HiFi but just as I hung up Joe called me and brought tech guru – whose name is Tim – to my front door. I gave Tim my card and he said he’d be in touch. He’d email me a quote a few days later, he said, and when he did I told him to go ahead with the job, which would include WiFi connectivity in the basement. On 1 February he called me at 5.36pm as I was about to do the dishes with the message that he’d come the following day to deliver and install the necessary equipment.
Something came up in his diary the next day however and he SMS’d me before 10am (the time he’d been due to arrive to do the work) to say he’d come in the afternoon as another urgent job’d occupy him in the morning. He rocked up at about 3.45pm. By 4.24pm I’d connected my mobile phone to the network, and by 4.29pm the TV, at which time Tim was upstairs connecting access points. We got the printer and the PC set up by 5.05pm. The printer demanded – and got – new yellow, cyan and magenta cartridges, an item I had on-hand in the electronics cabinet downstairs in the lobby. To make sure the PC linked to the NBN Tim gave me an aerial out of his own, personal supply – he didn’t charge me for it – and it fit to the device. Downstairs, we both set up the blinds to work from my phone. An access point in the basement would work for pool controls that I’d planned to order and be installed (though I never got this done).
Google threatened to disable access to its search engine for Australian users on 22 January so on that day I changed the default SE in my mobile phone’s browser to Bing and on my PC started using Edge – linking from there to Bing.
On the 30th I was doing washing again – this time bedsheets. I’d not changed them since moving in, but they needed to be done despite the fact that it was raining on that day. I dumped the cloth down the chute to the laundry and put on a load, then went back upstairs to use social media (with my five Twitter accounts) before returning to put wet things into the dryer. I repeated the journey twice more, including one trip to check up on progress of the second wash. By evening, everything had been put away in the cupboard.
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