Despite being at work all the time, and being constantly busy, I am still a human. I am social. I have a life, family, and friends. I have thoughts and experiences. Once in a while I share them, and when I do, I do so in this category. If you don’t know me personally, chances are you’ll find posts in this category particularly boring.
I’ve accidentally noticed today that I have climbed up yet another step in Google’s page ranking table. Searching just for “leonid” brings up the link to this blog on the first page of results!!! I’ve attached the screenshot for historical reasons too (that is when I’ll be the number one link).
Things like this boost my enthusiasm enormously. Expect even more blogging in the future.
Tires on my car are getting old and bald. Unfortunately I don’t have the budget to replace them now and driving like they are is not fun anymore. So I decided to swap the front tires with back ones to buy myself a couple of month.
I passed by the 24×7 tire care service. While one technician was swapping the wheels, balancing them and checking for other problems, I was talking to another one. He told me a few interesting things that I didn’t know or forgot about.
So, all these news just show that I will be spending a bit more money in the near future than I wanted. Firstly, I’ll have to bring the car for service and get an MOT certification while I am at it. Than I’ll have to go pay the road tax. And than I’ll have to save some money for the tires. I need to buy at least 2 of those. All of these make an amount of roughly 400 CYP shine much nearer than the horizon. Oh, well… At least I enjoy every kilometer driven in my car.
Today I went to CYTA to pay for my mobile. Somehow everything went very quickly. There weren’t too many people in their offices at 7:30 in the morning when I came. All the clerks were still fresh and smiling and very polite. It turned out that I didn’t need any ID or any papers at all. I just came straight to the cashier who asked me for my phone number and told me how much I had to pay. I paid and my mobile was useful immidately. I mean I didn’t even step away from the cashier when I checked it.
It might sound strange for those of you living in technologically advanced countries, but I was pretty much surprised. Government body is using a computer system which works and is integrated as low down as the cashier clerk. Fantastic!
Even middle of nowhere, like Cyprus, can’t avoid progress and global computarization. That’s an excellent thought to start continue your day with.
I was very surprised to find out that outgoing calls from my mobile stopped working from today’s morning. I thought that maybe CYTA has a problem again or something. Usually, when they disconnect the phone for unset bills, they play a message saying so every time the call is attempted. I was just getting a busy signal and call dropped.
I waited half a day, moved around between cells, but still nothing. I than asked a couple of people if they had the same problem. Noone of them did. And indeed my wife’s mobile worked properly. So I moved my SIM card to her phone and tried calling. Nope. Didn’t work. I then called CYTA (fault reports number is 8000-0197, not 197 as they advertise) and they told me that the phone was disconnected because of unset bills.
That got me totally confused since my phone bill is payed via standing order by the bank. Automatically. I checked my account balance and sure enough I had funds available. So I proceeded calling the bank and asking them if the standing order had expired or something like that. In the end, it turned out be my mistake – I had a huge withdrawal which practically nullified my account until the next incoming money transfer two days ago. And, in complience with Muphy’s law, my phone bill came exactly in that time. No money – no bills paid – no phone services.
I’ll have to pass by the CYTA’s office with some cash tomorrow morning and pay it using the old way. I guess there will be a whole bunch of people like myself. Heh.
Olga gave me a somewhat early St.Valentine’s Day present – Philips SBC-HP800 Hi-Fi Headphones. These will help me to be more productive in the office, isolating my ears from all the noise there.
If you are interested, here are the specs from the box:
There is nothing much in the box – just the speakers and the standard 3.5mm to 6.3 mm adapter.
I like the sound a lot and the headphones are very comfortable to wear. Let the mp3 times begin. Again.
P.S. The picture was stolen from here.