Two Lessons Learnt

[davidgillon]

After the last minute scramble to get my Pitchwars submission in I got to sleep sometime after 6AM and woke up at 9:30AM. This wasn't really enough.

Today was supposed to be a reasonably leisurely day before heading into London in the evening for a drink with friends, then various things got concatenated together.

Pitchwars
The holiday prep I'd meant to do yesterday - a wheelie friend has strongly advised me to get my booked assistance with Ryanair for the flight home changed from 'to aircraft' to 'to seat', reminding me Ryanair are too cheap to use airbridges, so it's likely to be bus out to the middle of nowhere and climb an airstair in the middle of all the other passengers. She says she was literally trampled on the stairs once. This seems like a good idea. I'm probably not going to bother with changing booked assistance Aegean for the flight out as I'll have a friend on the flight and they used airbridges last time IIRC.
Printing out everything I need printouts of - hotel bookings, directions of hotels, where we're meeting etc, only I need new ink cartridges, and if I need to spend £20+ on ink, then I just happen to have a £40 HP voucher (for the laptop balls-up) that needs spending in the next couple of months - so new £80 HP Envy Inkjet to await delivery of (paid £30 with voucher and £10 off), which of course got scheduled for today.
Trains to from airports to book, with assistance.
Holiday cash to pick up from Post Office (ordered online yesterday. available after 1PM today).
Needed to get to cash machine to get cash for night out with uni crowd.

I was clearly running sluggish this morning, so decided to concentrate on what absolutely needed doing today.

Spent time waiting mugging up on a little Greek.
Printer delivered at 1PM, quickly up and running - reasonably impressed.
Headed into Rochester about 2PM to hit the cash machine and pick up my Euros from the post office

This is when things went wrong. I'd adjusted my footplates on the chair last night - I lowered them the other week and while more comfortable they've been catching on too many gutters etc, so they needed shifting up. The new multitool I bought didn't have the grip to unbolt them, so I used an adjustable spanner to loosen them, did the adjustment and deliberately didn't tighten them as hard, with the idea of being able to use the multitool if they needed adjusting again. Bad idea.

Right-hand footplate swung out of position within 10 metres, tried pushing it back, but it kept doing it, so I flipped it up and crossed right leg over left.
Got to cash-machine, out of order - took me three tries to notice because the screen is angled back - fine if you're reading it from above, not so great if you're reading it from chair height.
As I headed for second cash machine, left footplate similarly swung out of position, so flipped that up as well and curled my crossed legs back under the chair. This really doesn't do the efficiency of pushing any good.
Got cash, decided not to bother with Euros today (did I need the email notification or just my card? still need to check that, plus opposite end of highstreet with no footplates)
Got back to car, drove home.

Just short of home (fortunately last 100m), head starts spinning, clearly tiredness, by the time I pull into the drive I'm completely light headed. I got into the house, couldn't work out where the car keys were and turned around to find them sitting on the path outside. Absolutely no way I was fit to take a train journey into London.
So I sent a message to say I wouldn't make the get together, and was sound asleep in bed by about 3:15PM! 
Slept til sometime after 8PM or was it 10PM - I've got a bit of a blank between the two, so may well have woken up, then gone back to sleep.

Lessons learnt:
1) Fasten the damn footplates tighter
2) Get enough sleep!

And still got all the printing out and booking etc to do!

Comments

[kaberett]

FTR (and this is probably a bit late), I kept my full toolkit for chair repairs in my black box when flying to the US and back again a few months ago (so they came with me to gate then went into the hold) and this was absolutely fine. And then, of course, I didn't have to use any of them, but again, that's something I'm okay with!