Troubleshooting done

I woke up at the usual time under a grey sky, just before 'Thought for the Day', wondering how June's computer disruption had occurred. When I got up and switched it on again, I went back into Chrome's record of sites visited and found one search from yesterday was not via Google but using Yahoo's search engine. June doesn't know anything about Yahoo, so it must have been used accidentally. Google search engine is the default one, but there are four other options, of which Yahoo is one. 

I learned that she tends to use the top of page search bar rather than the default Google one in the middle of the new tab page. Somehow in making a query yesterday, she'd done so in the top search bar and had used Yahoo which has a reputation for being a bit dodgy and susceptible to 'bad actors'. Maybe this was how this alarm warning got through. Whether it was a fake warning to trick you into making an expensive call to the USA from a scam intrusion or a genuine operating system alert doesn't matter. Deleting optional search engines reduces the risk. And that's what I did.

With this sorted out after breakfast, I was able to do some shopping and post letters, then fix a few small phone issues on mobile and landline devices, and pop across to the Opus Dei Boys Club to have a team member there witness my signature on June's Power of Attorney document. 

My only failure of the day was to get June's mobile phone topped up. I went through the Tesco mobile account registration and payment process on the laptop, and despite pressing the £10 top-up button, the payment registering through the bank security protocol was £1. Tesco minimum top-up is £10, so the  payment was rejected as insufficient and I was unable to register her account. I called the IRC help line and was sent a SMS on the mobile phone where I repeated the procedure and got the same result. No further response to my reporting of a faulty web page. Tesco Mobile is in denial about it. I wonder how long it's been like that? I was unable to buy a paper top-up code as there's no local Tesco store within a mile's walk. That was a time wasting frustration.

June cooked me a very nice spicy chicken dish for lunch, and I set off for Victoria Coach station by bus, as there's a rail strike on today. I got a bus from the corner of the Common which took me as far as the Thames at Battersea Bridge, then I walked the last mile and a half to the bus station to get some exercise before traveling. 

I had an open ticket as I had no idea what time of day I'd be returning and had to queue twenty minutes to swap my open return for a booked ticket. I could have done it quicker on my phone but it was too much of a fiddle, and I couldn't print it out, or display it digitally without having another app installed on my phone. I had an hour and a half to wait for a five thirty coach, as I couldn't get a ticket quick enough for the four o'clock, but never mind. Traffic congestion was worse than usual due to the train strike. It took an hour and fifteen minutes to get from the coach station to the A40 traffic queue en route to the M4. The first forty minutes were taken up crawling 1.3 miles down to the Thames Embankment. Thanks to the rail strike.

I dozed for a short while, then read Soldados de Salamina all the way home, finishing as we passed Cardiff Castle. We arrived at ten fifteen, three quarters of an hour later than the outward journey time. Time passed quickly reading in Spanish and making sense of it as I went along with as few dictionary look-ups as was necessary. It was an interesting book about an investigation into a story partially told by others, about people during the Spanish Civil war, and one of its forgotten key ideologues. An epilogue about interviewing an elderly veteran, was in many ways was the most powerful part of a book that dwelt on the question of how different people remember and tell stories about significant events. It's something which stories compiled in the New Testament have a lot to tell us about.