I am an owner (a proud and rather happy one) of the BOSE Mobile on-ear headphones. For those of you who don’t know, all the mobileness of these headphones (and thus - a difference from significantly less expensive BOSE on-ear headphones) is that you get an audio lead with a microphone, which may be connected to your mobile telephone (iPhone’s naturally included) so you can use it as a headset. Frustratingly, it has no remote control for iPhone and once someone calls you, you still need to take your iPhone out and slide the green arrow).

To make a long story short - this cable has died. It has died and the right headphone started to disappear (while still working should you plug-in headphones to the audio source directly using the tiny 1” wire on the left headphone). I called up BOSE guys and was given a generous offer - I send them my headphones, pay £50 and get a new BOSE mobile headphones. Practically a bargain. After I gracefully refused it, they’ve suggested to go and buy a cable only - this time for ridiculous £39.95.

No, this not gonna work, I said to myself. Indeed, paying forty quid for just a few wires - that’s not a good deal. So I thought a little - if I can connect headphones to my iPhone directly, this means … oh hold on - isn’t this a standard 3.5 headphones jack on the left speaker of my headphones?

So I went to eBay and bought Griffin SmartTalk for £13.50 delivery included; now waiting for it and thinking, that sometimes being greedy just doesn’t work nicely even for customers who can afford buying £150 headphones.

This week was especially long and nasty; so many things happened or keep happening, that somehow that’d be enough for a good month, not overwhelmed with events - both pleasant and not. But anyway, glad this week is over, phew…. 

Today was a day of great wonders for me.

My first wonder was (an only unpleasant one) that my iPhone suddenly stopped finding the O2 cellular network - specifically at my working place; should I come down to the ground floor level - it works, should go to the meeting room - it works, should I come back - it doesn’t. Tried all the usual tricks - like “did you try to turn it off and on again” © — as well as re-installing the firmware and resetting it to factory settings - nothing worked. So that was the time for my second wonder —

…I called O2 and they - after quick over-the-phone diagnostics told me, that problem is apparently in the handset, and advised me to go to Apple Store, to Carphone Warehouse or to the nearest O2 store — precisely in this order of preference, as it likely to have direct impact on how long it may take to sort the problem out.

I went to Apple’s website — and found empty Genius Bar timeslot at Westfield’s Apple Store — may be not the closest one (as Apple Store @ Regent st is within the walking distance), but it took me only 25 minutes to get there

Westfield. Huge, huuuuuuuuuuuge mall - well they say it’s a biggest one in Europe — so I’ve got every damn reason to believe them. Although when it came to locating the Apple Store, I quickly made my way to one of their touchscreen terminals, and in 3 or 4 taps I got a route on the screen which I should follow - as simple as that, really difficult to lost your way.

In Apple Store - well, I was asked to wait 10 minutes which turned out to be only 6 minutes waiting — but after that the gentleman at the Genius Bar (namely Mr Gary Mercury) quickly asked me couple of questions (not unlike the ones gentlemen from O2 has asked), and after that made a blunt proposal to replace my iPhone - right here, right now. Minimum paperwork - two signatures that I’ve got a backup and I’m aware that my data will be destroyed - and a new black, shiny polished iPhone is in my hand. It was quite empty - no music, no books, so I downloaded a MacBreak podcast via the Apple Store’s wireless - and departed

My last wonder was - when me and another chap discussed iPhone’s problem in my twitter tonight, we’ve mentioned word ‘carphone warehouse’. Two minutes after that a guy appeared in my twitter, asking do I have any problems with CW and whether I need any help. Look, it’s so really simple - to have a search on certain keywords, and simply ask if people are unhappy with their telephone, service or whatsoever, connected to Carphone Warehouse (assuming they can advise something afterwards) - but it makes clients see that they’re really taken care of.

So, today was a day of many wonders - quite a good day I would say. So good night everyone — and see you tomorrow!

Received HUGE box from Argos - 50kg. Long sad story how I got it to the 3rd floor (I haven’t seen “2 man handling only” on the box, and I didn’t have anyone to help me anyway). It sounds like I’ll have a lot of fun tonight - an assembly instruction is 20-something pages.

• Primary skill of the line manager is to make some numbers up, and gravely declare them a current project’s estimates.
• Whoever divines estimates correctly more than two times, is considered an expert. An expert’s liberty is to explain in an equally grave manner, why the estimate didn’t match the real figures.
• Whoever guesses right estimates for three or more times is considered to be a professional manager and is automatically queued for promotion; at his new position he’ll be making up bigger numbers, as well as imposing these numbers upon others.

Feel very very stupid indeed - the amp I’ve been looking too went for £52 — which is ridicilously low price — but I didn’t get it.

I use AuctionSniper, which puts bids 3 seconds before auction is completed, it’s very convenient and I won lots of items for quite a low price (competitors simply don’t have enough of time to overbid you). I used it this time as well, but … 3 days ago I changed my eBay password. Well, it was just a routine change, I do it every couple of months, so nothing was wrong … until I received an email from AuctionSniper, saying that eBay rejected my bid due to “Incorrect login/password”.

Damn!!! Why this bloody looser sniper didn’t tell me about it when I only placed a limit? Grrrrrr feeling extremely angry with myself, and now closest possible price is well above 100 for the same unit.

Really surprised - just received a call from a very polite gentlemen who works for eBay, who told me (excluding all our mutual bows and scrapes) that they’re unhappy with the fact that I’m unhappy with my last transaction (I bought Nokia N800 for Natalie, and it didn’t have stylus so I left negative feedback to seller) and in order to make me a little bit happier they’d like to know, whether I’ll accept a £20 voucher which I can spend on eBay. Wicked!

(if you think that I told “No-no, I don’t need your voucher, I’m already happy enough” - then think again).

Very amused by recently received “Watching the English” by Kate Fox. Ah yes I do understand that I’ll never reach that level of exposure into English culture and language and habits (bad habits included) that people will starting thinking I’m English - but that wasn’t a purpose anyway. What makes me think this is a good book is that now I finally start to understand many things which made me “rather confused” when I initially came here; certain things which I thought were weird now seem plainly English to me.

I absolutely, totally, utterly loved the chapter on English way of introducing yourself, making small talk and saying goodbye - it was so hilarious, that I laughed out loud in the train and on the station and on the train again, not being able to stop reading this damn book - I laughed not only because of the book itself, but when I started to recognize certain things I’ve seen English people do (and the way they do it).

And yes, even though I’m still reading it, I can say with no hesitations, that this is one of the most useful books I ever read, inclusive of my ABC book. Get it. Read it. It worth it.

I totally love chaps from g2recruitment(dot)com - sorry don’t want to put a link on them. Once, very long ago, I was looking for job and I was stupid enough to send my CV to them. Bah - that was a major fuck-up on my side.

Since then, every day they are sending me email with various positions, 99% of them are absolutely, totally irrelevant to what my CV says (I bet they didn’t read it and just done some automated keyword matching). Best of all things is - in order to unsubscribe of this spam, I should login to their system and unsubscribe manually, and since I forgot my password, I cannot do it - because password recovery simply doesn’t work; idiots managers answer about 1/10th of my “UNSUBSCRIBE!!!” emails stating that they can’t really do anything with it.

What a crap they are! I hope I’d never search for new job with this guys :)

After reading this week’s Economist an only thing I really want to do, is to give myself a promise: “I shall never read any finance-related newspapers, magazines and internet sites, shall never listen to economy-related podcasts, and shall switch off my TV when the head on the screen speaks the word ‘crisis’”. Seriously, it’s so doom and glum that I don’t understand anymore what’s a point in living on Earth?

Shall I give this promise now? Or shall I wait until next Friday?