group

Wasn’t expecting that …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

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I got a text message from my boss, who is in Mexico at the moment for their annual holiday. The text said that she had received a ‘picture message’ from me, but could not open it. I quickly checked my phone, but I hadn’t sent a picture message to anyone, which I explained. It was then I noticed that there was an extra charge of £3.84 on my next bill. Very puzzling!

I went on to the providers website, but could find no nothing to say what the charge was for, until I got my next bill. The online ‘chat support’ was available, so I sent a message, basically asking questions: 1) who sent the picture and 2) what was the charge for.

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I had a very informative ‘chat’ with someone using the alias ‘Zahir’. He explained that I had sent an MMS message to eight of my contacts on the 1st January. I disputed this and explained that I had only sent a text stating “Happy New Year” to a group of contacts. He then informed me, that a group text, with my provider is sent as a text to the first in the list, then as a picture message to the rest. The picture being charged at £0.55 per message. It was then that I vaguely remembered being told this before. I thanked Zahir (or whatever his real name was) and quickly closed the call.

**Note to self: NO MORE group text messages !

Nightmare …

/ Tony / Leave a comment

Quite often, when I’m knitting from a pattern in a magazine I find I get lost when there are the famous “ ** xxx  *** “ closely followed by “ rep from ** to *** ” repeats in the middle of a row. In those cases, what I tend do WIPis to hand write the pattern repeat and use that when it is needed. My current ‘project’ has a 36 row pattern. Each right side row has a 12 stitch start followed by an 8 stitch pattern repeated 8 times. So I did as I often do and wrote out the repeat. Now this is where I made a mistake! For some reason, when writing out, I missed a yarn over after a decrease on row 13. This meant of course, that when I got to the end of the row, I was 8 stitches short. Bearing in mind that this was the second attempt at this pattern (first time, I dropped a stitch, which ran to the bottom before I could pick it up), you can well imagine the sort of language that was about.

However, after an hour of carefully picking back, I have finally got it back to the place where I went wrong. I am now able to breath again! I didn’t want to rip it all back and start again.

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While on the knitting theme, after some gentle persuasion in the comments of my last post, I decided to have a look at the other three groups. But, to no avail! The first group I tried explained that because of the size of the place where they hold their meetings, the number of members was limited. They did say that they would be happy to put me on a waiting list, so that’s good. The second group was basically a crafting group that had a (very) few knitters, but I was welcome to come along and try out. The third one was a strange affair. Membership was by referral from another member of the group, or at the discretion of the chair. I was waiting for her to say that she would use her ‘discretion’ but it never happened. At least I’m on a waiting list Eye rolling smile.

*** Update***

Guess what! When I recounted the stitches at the end of picking the work back, I find I now have 4 extra stitches that seem to have picked up somewhere. I can’t for the life of me see where they have come from, so there is very little alternative but to pull it all out and start again.  Steaming mad Crying face