as glaciers pounce on the Louisiana Bayou

O, billboard poets of Cape Town, how much do I love thee? I arrived at work in a fit of giggles this morning, having passed in quick succession the following three billboards:

1. BAFANA GOES DOWN!
2. PETROL GOES UP!
3. N1 AND N2 TO BE ONE-WAY FOR WORLD CUP.

This last was a beautiful delayed reaction. I'm even more muzzy than usual this morning, having woken up with a lurking sinus headache after a dodgily enjoyable dream involving, for some reason, me plus Vin Diesel and an unspecified but attractive Arab gentleman on the floor of the library, and I actually looked vaguely at the headline for a few seconds thinking "but they're not even parallel highways!" before I realised the date. Hee resulted.

I'm amused by how far this kind of joke heading makes use of the usual cognitive delay in attempting to parse the compressed meanings of a typical headline: you're so used to trying to make sense of the damned things, the absolute lack of sense in this particular context sneaks up on you.

While we're on the subject of the date: Unicorn School: The Sparkling is actually something I'd totally read, if only to watch Charlie Stross ruthlessly dissect it.

Four-day weekend coming up. I'm stoked.

I never post twice in a day. One word: Telkom.

Remember the giant cable spiderweb left behind by the Army of Reconstruction? Bits of it visible here? It still exists, as the last major thing we need sorted out post the Renovations of Doom. So two weeks ago I phoned Telkom and told them we needed a complete internal telephone rewire on account of all the free-floating cables with the bare wires showing, and they said "Oh all right then" and gave me a reference number.

Today I embarked on the painful, futile, self-flagellatory process of finding out why I've heard nothing further. This necessitates Phoning Telkom Helplines, an activity widely held to be popular in the Ninth Circle of Hell, and involving 45 minutes of the same thirty seconds of syrupy hold music, four different operatives in a Möbius strip of "I am not the one, phone the other helpline", and the eventual revelation that my initial call went to the wrong place, was logged by the wrong person, given an invalid reference number, I'm the wrong person to be doing this, and will I please start from scratch, in hard copy, having first metamorphosed myself into the account holder. At which point I lost it badly, informed the final consultant, at considerable volume, that Telkom's services suck, their company sucks, their customer service ethos blows goats, and they're basically incompetent as a commercial entity, and slammed the phone down. (Note, even in psychotic rage I managed to avoid a personal attack on the hapless operator, whose only fault is her choice of employer).

I am no longer quivering solely because I've just eaten an entire bar of cranberry and macadamia nougat, which I bought for my sister last night (she's a nougat fiend) and had to take away again because they've put her on Warfarin and apparently it interacts with cranberries. (Change in diagnosis: not, in fact, Bell's Palsy, but actually a tiny lesion in an artery at the base of her skull, eventually revealed via a second MRI, three radiologists and a techy dweeb who's really enthusiastic about manipulating MRI images to reveal miniscule events. She's still getting better in leaps and bounds, and prognosis is just as good). I am also retaining mental health by the fixed contemplation of a four-day weekend coming up, Salty Cracker at Yindee's tonight, and a grim determination to bunk work at 3.30 sharp recking not the Dean's outraged stare.

Rant list update: (1) Telkom. (2) Parcelforce. That pretty much does it.