the adlards

I was sitting on the deck this evening, enjoying a rather good merlot with bicuits, when the sitting room door opened and out came Josie. Her eyes lit up predictably when she saw the biscuits; she clambered up onto a chair beside me and helped herself. Then she turned and saw the sunset:
Wow! Dad! What’s that!
Oh my goodness Josie. What is that?
That’s horizon.
(Dad takes a second to recover from hearing yet another word he knows he’s never used with her)
Yes, that is the horizon. Do you know what it’s called when it looks like that?
No. What, dad?
That’s a sunset Jo-Jo.
Oh. Yellow.
That’s right. What other colours can you see?
Yellow and black.
Black?
Yes. (pointing at trees)
That’s right, the trees look black. What colour’s the sky love?
Orange and blue, dad.

It’s always important in these conversations to ensure you both have your white balance correct.

It was a lovely evening after a somewhat fraught few days. You might have wondered why I haven’t blogged for a couple of days (or you might not). The fact is I needed time to tone down my initial passionately vitriolic response to our visit to the Fiat dealership on Friday.

On Friday we took the Fiat in for its first service. We booked it in at 10.30 for a “just less than 2 hour” service. We thought we’d do it on a day I was on holiday and drive the car down for the service then get the kids on a bus (which Josie loves) for a couple of hours shopping. We were still waiting for the car at 4.15 with a service manager who would have been fired from the sales team at any self-respecting cinema multiplex. He never once apologised; the closest he got was to tell us that he knew it hadn’t worked out well this time, but if we insisted on talking to him personally next time it would all be OK. You might imagine how well that line of reasoning worked. I let Michelle loose on him. He retired, quivering, to his desk and we walked down the road to a dodgy park with the smell of weed wafting over it from the nearby canal to sit on the swings in the rain and steam about how absolutely rubbish the service management at Fiat is.

What was really frustrating was that the work itself was OK, it was just managed absolutely pathetically. That man shouldn’t have had authority over anything more than a single-celled organism. Leave him at home to play with his sea monkeys. That’s probably what “his” mechanics thought too; maybe that was the problem.

The weekend generally got better from there. We’ve finished the floor at last, but are both pretty shattered. Next chance to catch up is Christmas … like that’s going to happen.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 2nd, 2005 at 10:20 pm by james and is filed under Josie, Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.