Live Toads

I once heard an interesting statement that has stuck with me ever since:

If you eat a live toad first thing in the morning, nothing bad can happen to you for the rest of the day.

The point of the statement being: theoretically, eating a live toad is one of the worst, most unpleasant things that could possibly happen to you in the course of your day, so everything else is a step up. Comparatively, everything else has to be good, so nothing "bad" can happen to you after that (it's better than eating a live toad, so it can't be that bad) and your day necessarily improves remarkably from that point onwards.

Normally, you don't get the chance to test theories like this because you're not likely to eat a live toad, are you? Today, however, I had the privilege of seeing that principle in action.

No, I didn't eat a live toad, but I did discover there is a very real activity that is equally unpleasant - I tried to communicate with Telstra via the telephone. For those of you who don't know, Telstra is the semi-national-semi-privitised telecommunications company that rules the roost in Australia. It inspires such feelings of warmth and kindness amongst the Australian people that we actually prefer to deal with the taxation department than Telstra, if given the choice.

I had a relatively simple problem that needed to be solved: my SIM card had been playing up and I needed to have it replaced whilst still retaining the same phone number. The girls in the shop couldn't do it at the time, so they gave me a new card and a telephone number and told me to do it over the phone.

If given the choice in the future, never EVER deal with Telstra over the phone.

It took me over an hour of being passed from computer to operator to computer to operator to operator to operator to being put on hold for over twenty minutes to computer to operator to operator before they would actually complete the rather simple task of waking up a card that I already had and connecting it to an account that already existed. And then the PUC they gave me was wrong so I had to phone them back and get another one.

Seriously, after spending an hour on the phone with Telstra (most of that time listening to the same three pieces of muzak being played over and over again), nothing worse could happen to me today.

I cut my finger making lunch - ran a serrated knife over the top of a knuckle. As I tried to make sure the blood didn't get into my sandwich, I literally found myself thinking, "Eh, that's not so bad". Comparatively speaking, spilling my own blood was actually less painful that trying to get anything out of Telstra.

I felt a strong desire to create a cottage industry based around selling T-Shirts with one slogan written on them: "Telstra hates us all". I toyed with the idea of giving them away for free to anyone who had a legitimate reason to think Telstra didn't have their best interests at heart, but then I thought I'd probably run through a few million that way, so I changed my mind.

Since then, though, it's been a pretty good day. Heck, I have a feeling it will be a pretty good week. It can only go up, after all.