You're in a queue

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last fortnight, you will have heard that the band Oasis are finally reforming.

Whether the Gallagher brothers have settled their differences, or Noel just needs to raise some cash to pay for his divorce remains to be seen, but demand for these tickets is off the chart.

I’m a bit of a fan - not fanatical, but I’ve seen Liam Gallagher in concert a couple of times and both times, he put on a fantastic show.

My son, Hijo absolutely is a fanatic and I really wanted to get tickets for him.

So it was that I spent Saturday battling with websites and tech to try to buy them.

I had a haircut at 8.30 and rushed back home, arriving at 8.58 - rushed to my computer to hit that buy button on the dot of 9am when ticket sales launched.

And…..

“You’re in a queue”

There was a blue dot on the left of the screen - a progress bar, which wasn’t progressing

.

I had agreed to babysit for Little Ray of Sunshine so that Hija and Hijo could go to the Arsenal match, so I needed to be round there at 11.

By 10am I had moved to about 25%. Not wanting to lose the connection, I set up a mobile hotspot on my phone and connected to that, changed my PC settings so it didn’t go to sleep and got in the car to Hija’s house.

When I got there I plugged in and put the PC in a spot where I could keep an eye whilst keeping the other eye on LRS.

I needn’t have worried, I didn’t reach the front of the queue until about 2pm, at which point I joined another queue with the cheerful message

“There are 390,060 in front of you in the queue”

This whittled away until at about 3.30pm (by which time Hija had returned home) I got to the front and accessed the diagram of Wembley to choose tickets, of which there were about 6 areas with tickets, but looking at any of them, only a handful of tickets in each area. Trying to buy some, the price said over £400 EACH!

I did actually try and buy some (yeah - I know - what was I thinking!) but couldn’t actually get to the checkout.

Then I got this message

I was then booted out and went to the back of the queue.

There was more, but you get the idea - this was not fun! - and no tickets were purchased.

Anyway, when I arrived at Hija’s she told me that LRS had decided today was the day to do a ‘poo poo’ in the potty and that the parenting gurus recommend that when that happens, you keep the nappy off and go all in on potty training. The principle being that the kiddies will then get it and a couple of days later they’re done. Potty trained.

So I had the joy of potty training to look forward to for the day.

This meant staying in, LRS in a Tshirt only, to facilitate a quick, unencumbered potty dash and me asking her every ten minutes “Do you want a wee wee?”

The answer was invariably “No”.

Before she outsourced the potty training to me and left the house, Hija had also mentioned that LRS had refused to have her teeth cleaned, so if I could attempt that it would be appreciated.

Never one to shy away from a challenge, late morning I took her into the bathroom and tried to brush her teeth, but she wouldn’t let go of the toothbrush and ran out into the hallway to have a little paddy, which was accompanied by a little puddle. Fortunately on wooden floors, which are easy to clean.

Whether this was caused by a lack of control due to having a paddy or was a deliberate revenge wee, we will never know.

Anyway I lifted her up and put her on the potty. Sure enough there was more, so we celebrated her first wee in the potty, albeit not a perfect 10.

Last night Mrs A booked to go to an event called “So this is what happened” at the fantastic little Omnibus Theatre in Clapham. We didn’t quite know what to expect as it was six people telling real stories from their lives for 10 minutes each.

Well, it was fantastic. Six very different stories, ranging from two near death experiences, to a brilliantly told story I could really relate to - a chap who spent his lunchtimes at school in front of a computer instead of out playing. This was also me when I was at school!

The difference is, his dad put a password on the computer at home to stop him using it as he changed all the settings. But he worked out how to circumnavigate the password. This was just the start - it escalated to him effectively becoming a hacker and falsifying his exam grades at school, and a visit from the police.

I didn’t become a hacker I hasten to add!

These story tellers were from a branch of Toastmasters - a forum where people can practice public speaking. Clearly it worked!

There’s an idea for all of us!

That’s all for this week.

Have a good ‘un

Jerry