Bloody hell. Just had the most bizarre/tiring/fucked up day in a long time.

Woke up with a hangover. Early. I don’t remember much of it.

Eventually I started cleaning the whole building, top to bottom, except for the basement of course. In the meantime we had our new industrial strength dryer delivered. Tim and I heaved it up to the top floor and took the smaller old one back downstairs.

Unfortunately the dryer needed its own special high voltage wall connection. We asked about it before we bought it but Hugo and I could have sworn that they said no. So, we called an electrician.

Of course, none of these handymen can speak English, so I had to get Renata to converse in Russian whenever I could find her, otherwise I tried my bad Estonian (and probably just made things more confusing).

Dryer man left because he couldn’t do anything until the electrical socket was ready, so electricity man came and started working but then he had to leave because he needed some other equipment. Dryer man came back and didn’t understand why things weren’t finished. Eventually it all got sorted out and off we went.

In the meantime I was trying to set up our new Internet and digital TV connection. Everything went along rosy until I discovered a problem with the actual Internet link. The DSL line was working fine but no matter what I tried it wouldn’t connect to the Internet. A few phone calls to the telecom revealed that basically they’d fucked everything up and it should be ready now within 2 hours.

3 hours later and it was still fucked and everyone in the hostel was quietly pissed off at not being able to browse Facebook. I called again, this time directly to tech support and they said they could see the problem but needed the system administrator to fix it, but since it was already 7pm he wouldn’t be back until the morning. Great.

I reconnected the old router and got back online, that made people happy. All I wanted to do was sleep but Renata had beaten me to it, so I started doing laundry. Boy, oh boy does this dryer do its job. It was pounding through loads of laundry like a dream. I was quietly content, even though I’d been running around like a maniac all day. I had to drink a few small ciders for the sugar rush and energy kick to keep me awake, but I was doing ok.

Jason came over and made a really fucking good spicy pasta, which helped somewhat. The evening was rolling in and people were enjoying themselves, lounging around the common room. We even put a movie on for the first time in ages and some guys decided to order a home-delivered pizza. Top stuff.

Then, at 10:30pm, all the power cut out. Completely.

No worries, I thought. Let’s check out the switches! It happens now and then. Huh? They were all up. What’s going on? Maybe it’s the block or something. Nope, all the neighbours have lights. Even the shop below us…

Well. What to do? We brought out some candles (4 small ones) and I gave out some beers to people. We tried calling some different folks but basically it was too late for the caretaker to do anything, or want to. Even the 24hr service companies couldn’t work out what was wrong.

The guests didn’t seem to mind too much. The only real problem was that there were no lights in the toilets, so that’s where the candles had to go. Unfortunately the candles only really lasted about 2 hours. Never mind.

The pizzas got delivered and the people who ordered them got into a nice argument with the delivery guy. They didn’t realise that the delivery service was a separate fee, which was actually more expensive than the pizzas themselves. This was about the same time I realised that the door bell didn’t work without electricity, so there was no way of knowing who was trying to come inside unless you could hear them knocking.

I love night shift.

I sat up until 2:30 AM on the front step with a blanket, so I could open the door for people when they came back from wherever they were. I was planning on staying there until 7 AM or so, when Renata was meant to get up. Unfortunately it began to rain and I was feeling exhausted and quite stiff. I think I’m getting sick. I decided to head inside and try to sleep on the staircase near the doorway. I even had the brilliant idea of propping a broom up against the door handle and resting it against the wall above my head, so whenever someone tried to open the door it would fall down on me to wake me up. It worked.

By 6 AM I figured most people must be back, so I put a sign up saying reception is closed until 9 AM unless you knock on the window on the other side of the street. Yep, I slept in the window sill after that. With the blinds open so people could see me. That was a bit awkward but remarkably comfortable.

All of a sudden, it was 9 AM and the lights flicked on. Woohoo! Raivo the caretaker had done something magical to fix it. It turns out the dryer was sucking too much power and didn’t like being on the same power line as the sauna, or something. So, we need a separate line just for the dryer. That’s fine and all, but we can’t actually use it until then. 2000 euros of metal and we can’t do anything with it. Hmm.

Now I’m awake and I’m alive and the telecom company still hasnt’ fixed the fucking problem. I’m gonna call them again now.

Thanks for listening.