I have found the perfect chair for Cate

Cate spends an enormous amount of time sitting in office chairs. She starts work about 8:30 AM – gets a home about 7:00 PM – has a very quick dinner and usually works until midnight or 1:00 AM in her office upstairs in the apartment.

Her office chair seems to be OK but the one at home gives her enormous problems and she gets excruciating back pain.  This can only be alleviated by one masseuse in Vienna – and that selfish woman got herself pregnant and has not been available for months.

So I took on the task of finding Cate an ergonomic office chair to see if this could help solve the problem. William got one online and I investigated this possibility but I really needed something a bit different with a head rest and other widgets – and I could not find what I wanted - and I really needed to test-sit it.

Cate spends most of her time on the telephone on conference calls which can go for (and I am not making this up) three and four hours. Sometimes she will emerge from her office at home talking and I will think she is talking to me - but then I will realize that it is just incomprehensible burble and she is on a call and is just heading to the fridge for a glass of wine to keep her alive during the call.

Mind you when she talks to me about other things it can also be incomprehensible burble so I do have to pay attention because it is my job to attend to her needs. After all - it is she that keeps me in such immense comfort and up to my ears in Macs. 

Cate is one of those women who when they want to say something to their partner just says it wherever she is.

She will be in her bathroom using her hair dryer and I will be in the cat’s bathroom having a shower and she will ask me a question. When I emerge ten minutes later I will be accused of not answering her question. What question? The question I asked you ten minutes ago. You mean when I was in the shower? I don’t know where you were. Well there was not much point in asking me a question if you didn’t  know where I was. I don’t have time to go looking for you I am getting ready for work.

Anyway she needs back support and neck support and head support – and potentially psychiatric help but that is another matter entirely.

So I researched chairs available locally and the morning Cate left for Saudi Arabia I set forth for Berggasse to the place I found on the Internet. The address shown on the Internet was a mattress shop but as soon as I mentioned office chairs a young man was produced and he led me 100 meters around the corner to the chair shop and to his fine range of ergonomic chairs.  

I found the perfect chair - with absolutely everything adjustable – height – seat - headrest - lumbar support – arms - brilliant. The man was a board certified expert in ergonomics and demonstrated all the gadgets on the chair and what marvelous benefits they would have for Cate – he knew all about bad backs - I was beginning to think he knew Cate.  

I said it was brilliant and now came the excruciating part. Knowing what the outcome was likely to be I took a firm stance, gripped the arm of the chair in which I was so interested and enquired – as casually as possible – how much he was asking for this exquisite piece of modern ergonomic design.

Him: €960

Me: Really?

Examining my finger nails and curling my toes and thinking ‘Oh my sainted aunt how could a fershlugginer office chair cost so much? Is it made by teams of highly paid Elves in the black forest laboring over hot anvils and then shipped first class in it’s own seat to Austria by Lufthansa?’

Me: That sounds like a very reasonable price – is it on special for some reason – it’s not faulty is it?

Him: Oh no sir – it is in perfect working order.

Me: Well then I certainly hope it is not (shudder – nose wrinkle) made somewhere outside Europe?

Him: Oh no of course the main parts are German made - but there are parts that come from…..

Me: Don’t tell me they come from (another nose wrinkle) China!

Him: Oh no certainly not - they come from Italy and Spain but perhaps there might be maybe a tiny teensy weensy little piece that comes from………er…… Asia

Me: Well as long it is only a tiny teensy weensy little piece and will not affect the overall European-ness of the chair. We Europeans must after all protect our heritage. 

Him: No of course not - the important mechanical parts are German precision made and will last at least 1,000 years – and are guaranteed for 12 months.

I think he was impressed by my stoic performance and carried the chair to the car for me. He did this because I told him about my broken ribs but also because It will take a while before my toes uncurl and I can walk properly.  Even after this length of time here the prices still astound me.

Before we came to Vienna it is absolutely inconceivable that we would pay prices like we do for the things that we do. It is one of the most expensive cities on the planet – and I buy everything that I can online from Amazon.

The other weird thing about Vienna is that you have to pay cash for almost everything. Almost no one takes credit cards and limit for Bankomat – bank cash cards - is €1,100. I love that no matter how much you have in your bank account you can only spend €1,100 – that is just so Austrian.

So if you want to buy furniture for €3,000, as we did recently – you have to go to the bank and get cash out and take it to the stores. In Australia if you carry that much cash around you are probably a drug courier. In Austria you are just a furniture shopper.

They are Barbarians!

Our trip home was remarkably uneventful – given the excitement of the preceding 10 days.

We had a 7 hour stopover in Dubai and were going to be arriving there at 4:00 AM – and  - as we were traveling road kill class and could not get into any lounge - had decided to spring for the hotel inside the airport.

Rozalin had booked this for us and it proved to be remarkable inexpensive – all things considered. By booking in advance it was €125 - which was less than we had paid for a meal and a bottle of bat’s piss at Camp Festering. The room was excellent and the bed was sensational. We fell asleep immediately and slept for four blissful hours.

I had no idea where we were when I woke up. I staggered to the window and opened the curtains and found that I was in the middle of a departure lounge.

We awoke with enough time to have a decent coffee and spend some money in the airport. Drinking coffee and spending money being two of our favorite pastimes in the whole world. 

Cate spent some money at Kiehl’s and the sales assistant looked at me and gave her some ‘damaged face repair cream’ for men. Nice one.

There remained only the 5 hour flight between us and glorious Vienna and our cats - and I had been saving two special films for this. One of these was The King’s Speech which I dearly wanted to see but I had refrained from doing this because I knew that by the time I reached the last leg I would be at my wits end – not that it is a particularly long trip for my wits from one end to the other.  

But sod’s law prevailed and as soon as I touched my ICE entertainment  screen it flickered and died. I panicked and thought that I had somehow trashed the system – but every other one in the airplane soon followed.

So I read and thought about life and wrote a blog and stared into space a lot. I was thinking about writing a book about how I overcame my Christianity to become an Atheist - or is it a Skeptic – I have read so much I am not entirely sure about the definition - and I have been doing lots of research.

But really – who cares? 

I am perfectly happy being what I am. Christians are perfectly happy being what they are. Atheists are happy being Atheists and don’t read books about it. If Christians read my book they would say it was nonsense and would attack it and me – and it would not change the mind a single one of them. I could not mention Islam or I would be attacked at best and killed at worst.

I have convinced myself in one paragraph. No book. I will shut the fuck up!  

The seat in front of Cate was damaged and could not be placed upright so she spent the trip chewing the head rest of the seat in front. Now she could have moved to the seat next to her – which was empty – but she was making a point. She asked for fish and they had none so she got chicken. I gave her my fish – that is the type of guy I am. I put her chicken in the life vest under my seat.

She hates Emirates. We are flying home Emirates Business Class In August. It is the cheapest. If Crapair was the cheapest we would fly with them.

The cats were delighted to see us and Muffin greeted us with a special dribble. Later she vomited on the cushion. She does this a lot these days and I guess at 90 I will do the same.

It is nice to be back - and life now goes on as normal. Cate has gone to Saudi Arabia which is one of her least favorite places in the world – for any number of reasons.

The biggies are of course the way they treat women, the way she has to dress (top to toe in black) and of course that she cannot get any alcohol the entire time she is there. Shriek!

Her boss, Huggy Bear, is very fond of a glass or two and he likes the opposite sex. I just don’t know why he does not close the country office down. Who wants to have an office in a country where they don’t drink and you can’t look at the women? They are Barbarians!

Freedom is just over there

While I have your attention I should tell you about Merisi - who is a truly wonderful photographer. 

If you have an interest in either photography or Vienna you should add her to your blog list – you will not be disappointed.

Meanwhile………

Almost everyone on the island was of Chinese or Eastern European  origin. The first time we were there we saw a party of Australians - but they may have been shipwreck survivors.

After taking a look around we realized that all the signage was in English and ‘Chinese’ (we cannot distinguish between Mandarin and Cantonese) . After much discussion amongst ourselves we figured that  there must be package tours out of mainland China – which would explain why everyone was shown to their rooms before us.

Everyone smoked. We may have been the only two non-smokers on the island – so we spent a lot of time dodging around in the bar and restaurants to escape the smoke. It was worse than Vienna because there were no ‘non-smoking’ areas at all – apart from our room – and that was a ‘no-water’ area.

We discovered that the best restaurant on the island was the one we had used when we were in the Water Villas. It was buffet style and had a surprisingly good menu. It was better the second time around – probably because of our experience on the Dream Smasher where we spooned down amorphous sludge at every meal.  

Weirdly – everyone arrived at 7:30  - and it was completely empty by 8:30. If you arrived at 8:15 there was almost nothing left to eat. Some people put their main course and desserts on the same plate. Never seen that before – but really the only way you were going to get any dessert was to get it at the same time as you got your main meal.

But you had to get the timing right when joining the queue or it did not work because it was a seething mass of humanity and was quite dangerous if you did not get it right – which we did not without a few practice attempts.

The first few times we just bounced off the periphery – a bit like a space capsule coming into the atmosphere at the wrong trajectory – and were flung back out into the balcony area. After careful observation we then worked out that forward motion with a crabwise sideways shuffle was required to merge seamlessly into the heaving throng.

Extreme flexibility was required because if someone stopped too long to examine the beef in black bean sauce then the whole line concertinaed and rear end collisions  could cause catastrophic damage to the dessert loaded plates. You needed to be able to segue out of the queue – and back in -  in the blink of an eye.

Our time was uneventful. We learned that the best way to find out about water was to keep the shower on. On the rare occasions when we heard the water drizzling we would rush in and have showers as quickly as possible before it went away again. We had lots of showers because we had lots of swims.

I did a refresher course on the Koran but learned nothing new. I also discovered something called  Junior MasterChef Australia. This reinforced my belief that those who develop TV shows will leave no barrel unscraped in their never ending quest to find the most eye-withering, gut-churning, nauseating pieces of toe raggery known to mankind to spread before those brain dead wretches whose lives are so intellectually poverty stricken that they are reduced to watching small children bake apple pies on TV. 

My sincere apologies to those who think this particular show is the best one on TV and whose children  just appeared on it.

Between our regular swims on our little beach – it was not really a beach it was a shipping channel - but who would split hairs over a trivial fact like this - we spent some time in the bar – counting down the hours to departure.

The final indignity came two hour before departure when a man knocked on the door and when I opened it he said ‘mini-bar.’ I said that we hadn’t used anything and started to closed the door and he said no he had come to lock it. I gritted my ears and said ‘what?’

He had come to lock the mini bar. I have been around a long time and no one has ever before come to lock the mini bar in any hotel I have every stayed. I was well stunned by this turn of events and watched dumbfounded as he came in, checked the mini bar - locked it and left.

What kind of people do they have in Camp Festering that they lock the mini bars? I think I just answered my own question. The type of people that you have to lock the mini bars two hours before they leave.  

I was standing there slack jawed and incapable of rational thought so Cate took me by the hand and led me down to the bar where she sat me in front of my MacBook and ordered me a Cappuccino.

She started drinking Zombies which were apparently very powerful. When it was time to go leave I discovered that she was incoherent and paralyzed from the waist down so I loaded her onto a baggage trolley and trundled her back to the room.

I got lucky and struck a brief water period so was able to make a cup of instant coffee to use as smelling salts and one sniff of these and she was back to her old self – as alert as a Meercat - and reaching for the telephone to verbally assault reception about the missing towel. 

I prized the telephone from her fingers and we left the room to start the long walk back down cannery row – which would take us to the boat, the airport – and freedom.