Not our day

Yesterday turned into a nightmare day.

As you probably realise by now, Tuesday is our home care day. Our usual lady, Linda, always arrives about the same time & leaves accordingly. Unfortunately yesterday she was off sick & another person was sent.

At 10.10am the phone went. It was N, to let me know she was on her way from Lancaster. I enquired was this late for being here for 10am or early for 10.30. She assured me it was the former.

By 10.45 I rang up the head office. There was no sign of N. Was I now supposed to be paying this person for 2 hours when she clearly was spending at least one hour just getting to us? They rang up N, rang me back to say she would be arriving any minute but I was to have the full 2 hours from when she arrived.

Come 11.45, I concluded I would give her until noon, then I would ring the office & suggest it was just cancelled at no charge to us, as we had things to do in the afternoon.

11.50 I get a ring. N. She was knocking & ringing the bell but no one was answering. I assured her nobody was knocking or ringing the bell at our door. What was the address she was at? There are various roads around us with the same first part of the address – roads, avenues, groves etc. Sure enough she’d gone to the wrong one. I gave her directions from there to here. She arrived ten minutes later.

It’s always stressful having a different person come. Much energy is spent showing them where things are & what needs doing. This time my morale was not much boosted by hearing her woes, how she’d got the wrong bus which was why she was so late. Then her mobile kept ringing – the office, complaining about how long she’d taken & her 12 noon appointment was already enquiring where her carer was. To be honest the work was done reasonably well, but by then I was in such pain, & so tired I sat resting my head on the door jamb while explaining what needed doing. She duly left around 2pm.

The Fox meanwhile was itching to get on with the food shop. He was ready to go at 1pm but I wasn’t prepared to let N go before 1.45pm (with some travel time to her next client). We finally got to the supermarket. We found wat we needed fairly easily. We got to the till.

We joined a queue – we didn’t fancy the self-service ones when we had a full week’s shopping. There was one queue that seemed fairly short. One person was on the way through & there was just one other person with about three items. Unfortunately, after the first customer paid, a member of staff butted in to have something put through the till as “training”. The cashier had no idea how to do this. The lady at the next till tried to explain. She still couldn’t do it. Eventually the member of staff decided to try one of the other tills. The man in front of us had his goods worked through. Now the till wouldn’t open as it had been set for “training” purposes. A supervisor had to be called to sort out the till again & his items of shopping had to be unpacked & passed through again.

We stood/sat & looked at each other. This was just not our day.

Eventually we got through.

We went on to the butcher to buy some chicken for today’s dinner. Wednesday is early closing day here so the shop is closed today. We went in. No chicken breasts on display. Lately there has been a shortage of chicken thighs. Is there now a shortage of breasts? It was with relief that we heard there was plenty. They were just filling up the tray.

I’m not sure we could cope with too many days like yesterday. I rang up the office of the care provider this morning & told them, if they were so short staffed that this was the best they could do, would they please ring & give us the option of cancelling the service that week at no charge. (You usually have to give them 24 hours’ notice of cancellation or you will be charged regardless.)  We could manage without a clean for one week. It is obviously more important that people who need more personal care – washing, feeding, getting up – get their care, but what happened this week was more than we can cope with & more than we are prepared to cope with in future.