Triskadekaphobia

[catsidhe]

So, last Friday — Friday the thirteenth — was sufficient to make Richard Dawkins superstitious.

First, I hear that there was a burst water main on Punt rd, and traffic was likely to be horrible.
Then, I am passed by a police car on its way to a car accident just up the road (and on my way), where a car had gone into a front yard over a brick wall, and ended up on its roof. This was not long before I passed it, and Hatzolah (the Jewish ambulance service) already had the driver on the lawn. That's all I saw as I passed, and I know no more of the matter.

Then, at work, I find there's a small crisis. The previous day I had investigated the troubles of one of my users, who had trouble with her roaming profile. (A common situation when the users go over quota and don't realise, which they don't with roaming profiles until it's too late.) As part of this problem, there was a directory which shouldn't have been there, where her profile was being put, which means she had two copies of her profile, which made her that much more over quota, and in my efforts to figure out what was going on, I made her account unusable. I asked the sysad what was going on, and he got curious and fiddled (with a very old, very complicated, very brittle Samba v2 (!) installation, and managed to break it, and several people were unable to log in. And for about a year, that Samba install has been broken, such that we couldn't actually join any computers to it, which means we could fix those users until the other problem was fixed. Luckily, he did, and fixed the other problem too. But the morning was written off. And the afternoon was given over to a machine with (I think) a virus which made the machine unusable, and while it did work in safe mode, the virus checker didn't, and and and arrgh.

And there was Drama in a certain list.

And I thought that was that.

Then on Saturday morning, I got a phone call from my Grandmother.

It seems that while I was having a dies horribilis, my Grandfather's ashes were being interred, and my family hadn't even bothered to tell me. Neither did my mother know about it until Friday evening. And my Grandmother was very upset when she discovered that I wasn't there because no-one had told me, which is why she called.

Leaving out any other family drama on that front, it feels very much like that branch of the family is writing us (my mother, sister and myself) out of it. And it seems that they aren't extending the favour to the third branch either. My cousin only found out and was able to attend because he coincidentally asked his mother the night before what she was doing that day.

I don't even know where he is interred, beyond ‘Eltham’.

Yes, I'm upset. But what really is pissing me off is that this isn't an isolated incident of forgetfulness: I had to chase them up to find out when the bloody funeral was, and when there, discovered that they had divvied it up between themselves. I wasn't even asked if there was anything I'd like to say. Only the children of that branch of the family got to speak.

I was willing to overlook it then, give the benefit of the doubt. But this just pisses me off. And I have had no contact from them since, either.

I intend to have a quiet word at Christmas. Let's see what they say.