Who's stupid?

It’s been a quiet week as we get back into the usual routine – though now we are well into May what passes for the usual routine will no doubt change as the weather continues to get warmer and people start to flag. Two of my students have already said that they are going to take a break from the end of the month, and I dare say that the lure of the beach will be more enticing than lessons for the younger ones when the schools close on 8th June.

The main features of the past seven days have, like last week, been eating and shopping, starting on Tuesday with our regular visit to Sigma. I was a bit surprised at the bill, which seemed a tad high considering what we had bought, but at the time of paying we got caught up firstly in a discussion over a renegade €50 note that had been left on the counter (which I assured Stephen and the cashier wasn’t mine) and then a strange dialogue between the cashier and a customer who was asking about the gifts catalogue for points earned in 2017 – the deadline for which ran out in February. The cashier is an immensely calm and collected young lady with clouds of what could be described as Pre-Raphaelite hair if it wasn’t darkly Italian and who runs her checkout and the customer service desk adjoining it with fearsome, if not austere, efficiency. The fact that I’m sure she thinks I’m bordering on terminal stupidity, due to the many errors I make when paying, together with my lack of the required Italian also added to why I didn’t query the cost at the time.

Later, however, with it preying on my mind I retrieved the receipt from the paper bin and found that I was indeed correct, and that we had ended up paying for not only our purchases but also those of the customer before us. A mystery worthy of Hercule Poirot left us with several questions: why had Miss Efficiency not closed the bill for the previous customer; whose was the €50 note and if it was the previous customer’s, why had she left without her change? Of such things is high drama made in MSP. Anyway, to cut what is turning into a rather convoluted story about a matter of little interest to anyone other than Stephen and me, Stephen returned on Wednesday morning with the receipt and my shopping list as evidence to the apologies of the cashier and the requisite refund – and the reassuring knowledge that even the best of us is prone to a mistake now and again.

We had no recurrence of this hiccup when we did our weekend shop on Friday, nor on Thursday when Stephen went to buy some more plants for the lotto from his regular supplier at the Francavilla ferramenta, nor this afternoon when we hit Globo in search of trousers for yours truly. As ever, my trusty personal shopper plied me with various options as I stood in the changing cubical and eventually, after much putting on and taking off of trousers, (Ooooh, Matron) I emerged with three pairs plus a pair of shorts for good measure. These, together with last week’s upper body purchases, should see me set for the summer.

It hadn’t been our intention when we got up this morning to go shopping, but a minor clothes crisis hit sometime before midday when Stephen asked me what I was going to wear this evening. This is because we had a dinner date with Computer Luca and our dentist, Claudia (who, if you recall, is an old school friend of his) at Arco, our favoured osteria in Magliano di Tenna. As my response to Stephen’s query was a sort of helpless puzzled lost look, we thought it was time to update my wardrobe, hence the shopping trip. And I am pleased to say that neither my new trousers nor Arco were a disappointment, with both living up to expectations.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for our old friends TIM, who phoned us on Thursday evening while Stephen was busy putting the new plants into the lotto and I was waiting for Laura and Rocco to arrive for their lesson. Yes, I’m sure you, like us, had thought we’d heard the last of them but true to the delayed timescale that the firm works on, someone had only just realised that our divorce had become final two or three weeks ago. The lady who phoned wanted to know why we had changed our telephone line, and when Stephen explained that we wanted a system that didn’t rely on a fixed cable she said that they could supply such a beast. Well, said Stephen, maybe someone should tell the TIM agent who said that there was no such system when he enquired about the possibilities.

Not to be put off, the lady started a Dutch auction, bringing their price down to €1 less than we are now paying monthly. Stephen held firm and politely refused all inducements to return to TIM, because what is the point of saving a euro a month when in return you get abysmal service. We have yet to test EOLO, and hopefully we won’t need to, but their response time can hardly be any worse. We were confirmed in our decision when, moments after the call finished, the phone rang again; this time it was the previous caller’s manager who had an interesting (if unsurprising) line in customer service. When Stephen again said we were happy with our new supplier and didn’t want to change despite their offer, the manager called him stupid and hung up. Enough said.