Victory!

And two things to tick off my to-do list!

First off, I went to SpecSavers and kicked ass and got my 45 euros that they owed me, putting an end to that drama after almost a month. Though, ok, I didn't really have to kick that much ass this time, and I wouldn't have had to go in at all today if I weren't such a wimp the last time I tried to get the money off them. I went in just before New Year's, and the same girl and guy were there yet again (they're the only two employees as far as I can tell). I went to the guy who was sitting at the counter, and he was either lying really well, or he really didn't remember me, because he didn't show any recognition of remembering me or my story. I said it'd been at least 2 1/2 weeks and I still didn't have any money in my account. So he gave me some bullshit about it being the holidays so it could take awhile, blahblahblah, see if it arrives after the new year and if it doesn't, come back and he'll give me the money in cash (which he'd already offered to do before). I decided then to wimp out give them the benefit of the doubt about this holiday crap and slink out without any money, but I'd be sure to get it the next time, damnit!! And that was today, and while I'd stoked myself up for some heavy arguing, I didn't need it, the guy just gave me the money, though with this whole attitude of there being a smile on his face, but in reality you could tell he just wanted to be done with me. Hey, I just want to be done with you too, dude, so thanks for the bloody money finally and hope to never see you again.

The second victory is that we finally won the battle of Boy and Girl vs. The Wall and Coat Hooks. This also has been going on awhile, I can't even remember when we bought the hooks. Soon after getting the hooks, we bought some screws, nice long ones that would definitely hold a lot of weight. We then had an exciting afternoon of first trying to screw in the screws directly, but finding out the wall was too dense at some point. So we tried drilling holes, but still the screws wouldn't go in far enough. We drilled again with a longer bit and drilled again with the original bit and basically made a big mess of it, making the holes too large for the screws to take hold at all anymore. We then tried creative ways to fill up the extra space, using either newspaper or bits of rubber from a balloon we'd popped. And amazingly, neither of those things did the trick. We gave up and decided to get screws that weren't as long and in the meantime filled the holes with some kind of plastery hole-filler-inner so that the screws would have something to grab onto once again.

After getting shorter screws, it still didn't quite work, they still hit against some part in the wall that we could just not screw into, so they were left sticking out too far. So it was back to the hardware store for the smallest size they had. O went in after work to pick some up, but he ended up coming home with screws that were the same size as the ones we already had. Big doh. Today then I was sent in to get the smaller screws because O was tired of the damn hardware store, and we gave them a go tonight, and lo, it worked:



We can finally hang coats. What luxury.