I was just chatting with Pompinka as usual and we got onto the topic of reinstalling the operating system. She said she could use a reinstall too, but she has neither the money nor an HDD to back up her data to. So I offered to send her one of my HDDs that I don’t use anyway. It’s a classic spinning Western Digital Black with 16 MB cache, 7200 RPM and 500 GB of capacity.
That was on Wednesday, but it was already around 17:45 and I had to tell Pompinka that the post office in Cesky Tesin closes at 18:00 – back then it didn’t occur to me that the post office in Trinec stays open until 20:00. But I promised Pompinka that I would send it first thing tomorrow, on Thursday. I didn’t hesitate for a second about whether to pack something else in as well; I wanted to surprise Pompinka with something, and hopefully it will turn out to be a nice surprise rather than a letdown.
Unfortunately, I slept until 12:30 (I had stayed up all night), and then I completely wasted the day by waiting for someone to drive me into town. At 14:45 my sister showed up at home, and about 20 minutes later I asked her whether she could drive me there. As always, she said she “didn’t know“, and since Mom was in her room too, she asked Mom, “Should I take him there?” Mom mumbled something about what a wonderful sister I have, one who “always” drives me wherever I need to go. First we stopped at Euronics in Cesky Tesin, where I had ordered batteries the day before; at 11 a.m. today they had sent me an SMS saying they had arrived. Then I popped into Tesco for some cotton wool.
You may be wondering whether a padded envelope wouldn’t have been enough. But it wasn’t that simple. Instead of a padded envelope I took the box from my Logitech Wireless Combo MK520 keyboard and mouse set, from which I used only the batteries I had just bought – the thing is, the rechargeable batteries from Tesco that I use in my GPS didn’t work with that keyboard, only non-rechargeable Duracell ones did. I went back home – I’m finishing this post on March 12, 2016, and all of this happened on May 28, 2015:
… so I could get it ready and send it off. On Thursday I somehow didn’t make it to Cesky Tesin by 6 p.m. 🙁 so I told myself that on Friday it would happen 100%.
But it turned out exactly the same :D. Then a “saving” idea struck me: I checked Idos and found out that a bus goes straight to the Trinec Tesco (that means via Nebory, where only a few buses run a day), but it was leaving in 18 minutes. So I grabbed the box and my wallet, and since going in sweatpants would have meant risking my freedom :D, I threw on some jeans and then threw myself out the door, because time was running out :D.
In case anyone is curious how fast I covered those 2.1 km over the hills around here, 👻 The website parked itself and threw its keys into the river.:D. In the end I still waited about a minute at the stop; the driver definitely wasn’t flooring it :D. I sent it off around 18:30 and asked whether it would reach the recipient on Monday. It won’t, because parcels leave everywhere at around 5 p.m.
And that’s without even counting the fact that the depot in Nachod delivers everything several days later than it should, which I’ve known from Pompinka for ages. All that was left was to play the Sportka lottery – I’ll win the super jackpot before that package arrives :D. But at least I got to race against a windstorm :D.