The Good, the Bad, and the Simply Mad.

Remember me writing this in a blog post recently:

Meanwhile, I’m developing quite the urge to approach Emily and ask: ‘Are you an INFJ by any chance?’ I’m very nearly certain that I won’t.

Today I did. I went through her till at the checkout, and when she’d finished ringing the goods through I was feeling bold so I asked her a question:

‘Are you familiar with the MBTI system for assessing personality types?’

Her eyes sparked with interest and she nodded. I continued:

‘Would you be an INFJ by any chance?’

‘I am, yes. How did you know?’

I told her it was because she had an air about her which suggested the fact. I said it was an air of affability, courtesy and helpfulness, but with an obvious hint of distance. She smiled.

And you know what? I think that’s the first time I’ve ever had a smile from an Emily. (My lovely dog, Emily, used to smile at me all the time, but I don’t recall knowing any human bearers of the name.)

*  *  *

And on the subject of dogs, I had a rare dog fix today. He was a yellow lab with an impressive harness (to make him feel important) and an injured eye all sown up and out of commission. I asked the accompanying human how it had happened.

‘We got him from a rescue centre,’ she said. ‘They thought he’d been hit with a spade or something because his teeth are missing on that side, too. But he’s spoiled to bits now.’

I was very glad to hear it, and the dog – I didn’t get his name – seemed glad of a lot of petting from me. He wagged his tail throughout, and matters don’t come much better than that.

*  *  *

The rest of the day was awful. I made my fourth attempt to speak to somebody at HSBC bank to make my simple enquiry, and after about twenty minutes of answering security questions I was put through to an Indian call centre. I was already fuming, and it didn’t help that the woman I spoke to had an accent so strong that I had to keep stopping her to ask ‘would you mind repeating all that, slowly.’

And then I was asked the security questions again. She wanted to know this number, and that number, and my date of birth, and my telephone security number. I didn’t even know I had a telephone security number, much less needed one. It seems I did, so I was transferred to an automated system to get one, and that meant answering the security questions again. Finally I had the required piece of information and was put through to somebody who could address my query.

Something was wrong with the phone system because it was breaking up so badly that I was only catching the odd syllable here and there. And then my phone went beep-beep-beep and the call was terminated. I gave up and put the previous forty five minutes down to experience. All I wanted to know was whether they’d received the cheque I sent on 3^rd December.

*  *  *

So then I got the email from my energy supplier informing me that my charges are going to rise again from 1^st January. We had a big hike last April, and then another one in October. This is the third, and just when the house is continuing to grow colder and I’m having to accept a degree of suffering in order to economise.

*  *  *

And then I read of the shortage of antibiotics to treat the outbreak of strep A which has killed several children in the UK and is happening around the world. It seems the shortage is partly being caused by Big Pharma who are hiking the prices in response to increased demand. That’s just the free market economy at work, of course, where only money matters.

*  *  *

I’m hearing the term ‘the system is broken’ much more often these days and I’m using it myself a lot. Thank God for Emilys and yellow labs, I say.