Living the dream in Céret…but I don’t want a refund!

with Mike Harding

So there we were finally, signed, sealed and shaking hands with the lawyer and the vendors, with a really nice bottle of wine from Tania the estate agent,  walking across Céret to the small house in a quiet(ish) square. Armed with nothing but a set of keys, a bottle of wine and (on my side) a lot of half-remembered schoolboy French, it was a dream fulfilled after much searching in the area. The little old town house was ours.

The place needed very little doing to it – it came with all the furniture and fittings (right down to the kettle)  and the rooms and doors and stuff were all fully functional, thank the Lord. I’ve spent too much time doing places up, from barn conversions in the Yorkshire Dales to a ruined cottage in Connemara in the far west of Ireland – no more mixing lime mortars and no more trying to ambush recalcitrant builders and ghost plumbers for me. All we had to do was switch the kettle on, sit down on the terrace and enjoy the view. Proper job.

I’d been reading P-O Life online for the previous several months so knew that there were a good few walks just out of the back of our house and, as an ex-president of the Ramblers Association, I was looking forward to getting the boots on.  And I did, and as time has gone on I am looking forward to finding even more paths into the hills (though unlike Asterix I do have wild-boar-itis)

Also, as the days went by, I relented a little in the Bricolage department, and had the Casot at the bottom of the garden turned into a shed for the grandchildren to sleep in – as students and boys they rightly qualified to kip in the “animal shelter” (trainers whose scent can kill at half a mile etc.)

To save their little trotters getting cold on the mezzanine floor I went onto Amazon Fr. and ordered a small carpet.

It didn’t arrive on the specified day – then it didn’t arrive again – and to be consistent it didn’t arrive  again. It seems that, though we were in the house all the time, a ghost (or The Virgin Mary) had appeared to the driver and had “refused to accept the delivery” but that I would be refunded.

I didn’t want the refund. I wanted the carpet. Refunds don’t stop your feet getting cold. I emailed, phoned ,  moaned and argued but the result was – well it wasn’t. In the end I was just ignored.

Since then I have ordered electronic cables which never came – mandolin strings, which it seems I “refused to accept” –  a Booster Battery which they failed to deliver because they couldn’t find the house (it must have gone to Perpignan for the afternoon) and a DVD player which I followed by tracker on my MacBook and which got within whistling distance of Céret and then vanished as the screen went blank. Presumably the delivery driver had been abducted by aliens or perhaps wild boar had got him, or the bear people from up the Têt Valley.

But no – it seems he and my DVD player had been cancelled (by me?), had ceased to exist, had become non-orders and I would get my money back.

Now, it was with steam coming out my ears that I e-chatted with polite people in Mumbai and told them that I didn’t want my money back, I wanted my stuff – and it was with dangerously high blood pressure that I pointed out that the time I had wasted ordering and waiting and going to the collection point were hours that I could have spent learning the bagpipes or discovering a cure for haemorrhoids – but it was all what the Irish call “a bottle of smoke.” When I finally did get to talk to somebody on the phone and was able to explain in my mangled Franglais what had happened, I was first put on hold and then cut off, not even in my prime.

But today, like St Paul I suddenly saw the light – it’s the algorithms. Algorithms are the bedrock of Artificial Intelligence. They are bits of software that link together to make AI work.  Often they don’t (imagine putting tentpoles together and getting one the wrong way round) and, when they don’t, other algorithms step in to pretend they are dealing with the problem;  they are programmed to only put up with so many questions from irate, mandolin-playing grandfathers before they shut down the process and like an aborted Elon Musk rocket it falls back to Earth,  or in my case, mud.

So, as my Irish granny  said about the Salvation Army “An army is it? Well, if you can’t beat them join them) I am now  looking for a clinic (perhaps in Switzerland), where I, too,  can be turned into an algorithm and can slot into the great machine that is Amazonland and perhaps then I might get the little tapis that will keep the grandkids’ feet warm.

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