To bloody hate the admin of life

And then I bet you had to submit the documents online? When I dealt with my mum's estate I had to do an id check on line. Stupid system wouldn't scan/upload the documents. Loads of faffing and it still wouldn't work so I offered to pop in with the documents as it was only round the corner. Oh no, it had to be done online. After consulting IT support it finally worked, but what a bloody waste of time......

I know 😔 Makes me quite sad really.

Young people have no idea how easy it used to be. You didn't book everything in advance, dick about with an app, exchange endless texts about everything, try to find people on maps with low signal. You just showed up at the appointed time, so did your mates, and bought tickets/parking/food after standing in a humungous queue in the rain 😆

I had to deal with something for an elderly relative for whom I have POA this week. It took me back to dealing with my mum’s estate. A large insurance company: Trying to find the right team to talk to involved numerous IVR’s, being cut-off twice, being given 2 different phone numbers to call neither of which were accessible to external callers, speaking to 4 different people, finally managed to get to the right team. Total elapsed time to find out where to send some documents took about an hour.

I purchased an extremely long phone cable and now have my printed hard wired phone line cabled into the back of the network hub for this reason!

I feel like more people should know about password managers as there is a running theme in this thread about people forgetting passwords and going round in a reset loop.

I use Bitwarden and all I need to remember is 1 password to open up the vault which mine has over 300 login details for websites that I have accounts or logins for. I don't know any of the passwords for these and the manager will auto fill and generate a password each time I login to a new website. Half the time I go to a website and forget that I've already created an account many years ago but the manager will just recognise you've got a login. It auto syncs with my laptop/phone/tablet too.

He did send texts saying it would be afternoon and finally came at 4pm saying they are always 'all day' appointments. 🙄
Fixed the valve but I think we now also have Water Hammer. At least I know what to tell the operator when I phone for another appointment, thanks to this thread!

@cheeseomelette oh what a pain :(

I find that pressing the star button repeatedly gets you through, they assume that you don't know what you're doing.

I had a problem placing an order on the Boots.com website yesterday, it never works very well, so I called and the customer service person obviously sussed I'm getting on a bit and was quite infuriatingly patient. She was doing everything except saying "Bless..." but at least I did manage to place my order.

Finally got a cleaner in (first one in 3 years....). I asked her to clean the oven amongst other things. She also said just show me what to do. Was fantastic overall (helped changed bedsheets, great cleaner.) But went back to oven when she left and she only did the door? Because I opened the oven door and said, look at this? but didn't do the rest?

Hired a local handyman first time. I put x's on the back of the door where hooks were to go. He chose completely different places than the x's. He moved a book shelf and just kept making it protude over the archway. It's a very narrow book case (60cm width) and wall is about 120 cm widht so it's not like there wasn't space to move it more to the left... See also not fitting wardrobe rail straight. back to square 1 again to find a local handman. In south west london!

Was doing a bit of work in the utility room only (hard to find someone to come into to do anythign really. found 2 electricians. 1st electrian could do sockets by the time of the delivery of the dryer however when he visited - he turned off one of the switches on the fuse box that wasn't labelled saying "it's not connected to anything". when he left, realised he turned the oven off (yes, he didn't bother checking the house to see if any power had been switched off.) We have issues with the upstairs bathroom light. he started fiddling with it, broke the light, and left it dangling. I said "are you going to leave it dangling" so he disconnected it, and said be careful thse are live wires. These were just on the visit. so now we have a gaping hole in the upstairs bathroom ceiling we'll have to pay to get fixed.

Lived in the house 10 years so a bit of a long laundry list of electician jobs. Now 2nd electrician visit. We have to replce the fuse box amongst other jobs. He only quoted that and the dryer sockets. We keep writing back - can you do the other jobs? But won't quote.

Why is it so hard to find someone to help with anything! Both husband and I work full time, neither of us can do all of these things...

At least now I have a dryer - sorry environment.

See also - why is it so impossible to get a mortgage interest statement. Surely this can be automatically issed 1st of May. it is always chasing . chasing. chasing. chasing . and not receiving. not receiving . not receiving.

See also - i need to get a full birth certicate for someone in northern ireland. I am holding the short one. send in a request, they can't find the name. send an alt name with the short birth certificate. still can't find it. if anyone knows something I'm not trying on the norther ireland birth certificate please let me know.

I've found in most cases that if you keep repeatedly pressing # it eventually gets you through to a human!

What a pita having to fiddle and Google with a newly installed item.
You have my sympathies.

@cheeseomelette sometimes boilers have a little lever underneath you need to pull down to equalise the pressure, could it be something like that? Is there any error message?

Finally had the text at 9.00pm last night to say he will be here between 8.00am and 1.00pm today. Fingers crossed.

He's 79 and never uses one word where 15 will do. When he writes to anybody I go through his text and remove about two thirds of the unnecessary verbiage. Also his writing is very small and not very legible. Any sensible civil servant receiving one of his hand-written missives would admit defeat pretty quickly...

That’s so funny.. there’s a lot to learn there!

I wish I had kept the very funny video/GIF that I saw a while back on this subject.

It was the scene from Airplane! where Robert Stack arrives at the airport to take charge, and he gets importuned by all the religious people who used to hang around US airports trying to buttonhole people. He kicks and punches and throws them all out of the way. As he does so, each one is captioned: "Cookies", "Location", "Newsletter", "Feedback popup", etc.

Three of those four screwups were by the private sector, and the speeding ticket was not affected by my ID.

I'm actually in favour of digital ID. Many European countries have it and not a single political party is proposing to abolish it. Ditto ID cards.

ID cards and digital ID actually protect you, because they enable you to prove, in a way that the government and the law are obliged to accept, that you are who you say you are. Look at the recent story of how 23,000 people lost their child benefit because HMRC decided to try and piggy-back the detection of whether someone is out of the country on whether they (or someone of the same name) bought an airline ticket.

Here's a challenge for you: You probably know several EU citizens who live in the UK. Find a single one who has ever been disadvantaged by the fact that their home country issues either physical or digital ID. Literally just one. I promise that you won't be able to. Next ask them if they would like the UK government to issue them with a biometric card proving their right to live in the UK (which at the moment is merely an entry in the Home Office computer). Literally everyone will say yes.

OP, I blame you for our boiler going on the blink. An hour to get through on the phone on Saturday, to book an engineer who won’t come until tomorrow. No better service for being on the Priority Services Register….

I hear you, OP.

It's the multiple barriers and hurdles put up to accomplish even the most simple of tasks. Several of those tasks a day stack up and so the barriers and hurdles feel relentless and unending.

I read an article in covid about 'micro-stress' which is exactly what you're talking about. Just hundreds of tiny moments of frustration per week which compound. They don't add up enough to say "I have a stressful life" (in fact, the article argued that lots of people experience micro-stress quite badly because they don't have too much broader stress in their lives), but they do mount up.