Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first irritate slightly

I'm feeling vexed.

It feels like the universe is conspiring against me and my dander is on the verge of being up. It's a combination of little things, one on top of the other, really. It started the other week with the lawn mower coming out of its winter hibernation and failing to start. It's just the switch that's not working - there are a couple of little springs attached to the cut off circuit breaker that aren't working properly, and taking it apart and remolishing it only allowed to splutter into a brief moment of life, just enough to make me think I had been pretty clever, before conking out again in response to my hubris. Similarly, the water pipe into the dishwasher had been dripping for ages, soaking the shelves of the adjacent cupboard and warping the whole structure enough to make the door of the dishwasher hard to close.

Yesterday I was in Birmingham for a web conference with the merkins, which should have been easy to set up and run. We went through three speaker phones before we found one that was working properly, and we didn't start the meeting until after four o'clock our time. If there's one thing worse than sitting through power point slides in a meeting, it's sitting through power point slides being shown over the internet with no way of interrupting the speaker to tell him to get on with the stuff that you actually do want to see.

I didn't get home until after seven, but already there was a problem with the server upstairs not seeing the network for some reason, and then we noticed that the shower door had been broken by person, or persons (or baby elephants) unknown. There's a little plastic hinge at the top where the door swivels that has snapped - I tried glueing it, but I'm not confident it will hold. What's the betting that the whole door will need replacing for the sake of a plastic doobry that should cost a fraction of a penny?

This morning, the traffic was murder - crawling for about twelve miles from Wooley Edge, all the way into Leeds, effectively doubling the journey time to over an hour. Oh, and we've got another web conference this afternoon, running from two locations this time for added fun and jollity. Still, at least I got an 87 this morning, so things are not *all* bad ... :-)

~Time passes, Thorin sits down and sings about gold~

Or, on the other hand maybe it is. I was set up and ready to go at two o'clock, but the techy at the other office had forgotten all about it, and wasted half an hour trying to get things working through the video conferencing pc rather than just plugging in the laptop we used yesterday. In the end I just had to say "Go and get the laptop, plug it in and go to this website". When we finally got through, one of the merkin delegates had had to reschedule so we couldn't have the meeting today anyway.

Universe 1, yours truly nil.