27th
Oh, Crappy Day
So, since I left work today pretty much everything has sucked.
Needed some tax documentation and they close early so there we went. After a long wait it turns out the clerk hardly seems certain about where he’s working much less what to do there.
Okay, screw that, me and the girlfriend are planning to go to a music festival in Gothenburg in the middle of August. Her favourite band will be playing and we think such opportunities shouldn’t slip by. To the train station as they offer deals on the train fare if you buy the festival pass from them.
The guy there was pleasant. Very pleasant. He just had no idea how to sort this thing. We had a queue build up behind us and people simply giving up and leaving. In the end we told him to just call us when he’d sort it out. He did, an hour ago, and the allotted discounted fares are sold out. Full price just seemed like to much so no Way Out West in Gothenburg. Which also means no Hasselblad Center for me.
We needed to get dinner but we were hungry so decided to stop at a Sibylla (that’s a Swedish fast food chain, let’s put it this way: if you want a burger try to aim a bit higher. Aim for a McDonald’s…) where I ordered a milkshake. Yeah, they had some problem with the machine so I had to wait quite a while for a freaking milk shake.
Get stuff for dinner. Decided on fried sausages and home made potato salad. I made the mistake of getting Swedish-made bratwurst. Won’t be doing that again. At least the beer and potato salad were excellent.
But, when I come home I check my e-mail and it turns out the mail had tried to deliver the lens I had been waiting for. Tried? Marie was home? What do they mean “tried”? Oh, well, a call to their customer service reveals that I can just use the shipping number and identification to pick the lens up. Rush out to the post office, pick up lens, find out I must pay custom duties. I’ve ordered all sorts of stuff of eBay, from the USA and China, and never before needed to pay custom duties.
Fair enough, though, I’m not going to nag about that but when I come home it turns out the lens is defective. The focusing is off (as in incredibly way off, it seems to go beyond infinity when focused to close distances) and the image quality is all FUBAR. Odd chromatic aberrations even if contrasts aren’t that big. It also shows evidence of having taken a hefty bump and a dented part by the rear element seems to make the lens reluctant to dislodge from the camera.
I need to spend my evening in Lightroom looking at crap photos made by broken equipment before I can contact the eBay seller. Booze and House episodes is probably the only things that can help this day out of abysmal suckiness.
Oh, and I wrote this on the trot. No editing. And it’s long. There might just something be wrong with my brain on top of it all.
