Interesting Day.

Do you ever have days when stress is piled on stress?

We had a huge day today with lots of people coming through to visit our retail activities. One lady came and had a happy hour browsing in the bookshop while her 200 children went feral through our toys... OK so I exaggerate slightly!

Margaret had advertised that we are having a toy sale this week, so the church is even more kiddie heaven than usual. It's hard to tell visiting children that these toys are OK to play with but these ones aren't.

Anyway while this family was happily enjoying our facilities we had a bunch of other people through to buy stuff.

It was all very busy but we could handle it.

Then this afternoon Margaret went to her annual tussle with the Spanish Inquisition- Centrelink. We receive a fairly generous family payment from the Government but now they are trying to rein all that in. The trouble is that we don't fit the boxes- both Margaret and I are full time workers who earn very little. So Centrelink is never really clear about whether we are really working or not or which boxes we should fit into. To make matters worse, they were trying to conduct this interview in the middle of a one-day renovation of the office. In the end the Centrelink worker decided it would be much easier if Margaret returns on Monday, after she has had a chance to find an exemption for us and can think straight without being surrounded by chaos.

Meanwhile I was playing electronic tug-of-war with the Tax Office. Each quarter businesses are required to put in GST returns. In the past I've done this on the internet which makes it very quick. But we ran into a problem when I upgraded my computer a few months ago- for some reason the digital certificates that you use to sign on would no longer accept my password on my new computer. So last time I used the old computer which is now Margaret's computer. A couple of weeks ago, I sent in a request for a new certificate in order to do this quarter's statement. I installed it on my computer then found it wouldn't accept my password. Aaaaaaagggghhhhh! So I rang the ATO's help line which was busy, but eventually found a number for the technical helpdesk. They told me how to re-install the certificate, but it didn't fix the problem, so I decided to just go back to paper statements. I rang the ATO again and was on hold for 45 minutes or more (thank you Lord for speaker phones!), before a very helpful lady took my details and then said "I'm going to try and get these technical people to solve this problem." She put me through to a higher level flunky who wasn't at all fazed when i said "Look I'm using linux and I know that's not supported." He went on to explain there was a bug in the software that if you had a box ticked that actually looked like it should be ticked it would not accept password changes. So we went through the steps, unticked the boxes and logged on happily.

So we got to the end of the day having felt like we were swimming upstream for most of it! At least we got done everything we needed to do and found helpful people in Australia's two biggest and least friendly bureaucracies. Miracles all over the place!

No time for photos today. :cry: Maybe tomorrow!

Blessings


Keith