OneAndOneIs2

Right, let's see... chronological order would probably work best...

In order to get onto my place at university, a prerequisite is spending two weeks in schools observing first. Don't ask me why, when we spend most of the year-long course in schools anyway, it just is. So I wrote to every school in the local area asking if they could grant me a few days. I got one reply, which was "No" - the rest ignored me.

Helpful. So I wrote to one of the women who'd run the "taster course" I went on in January: They were, she had insisted back then, here to help. Maybe she could suggest some schools that were more likely to say "Yes"?

Well, maybe she could, but as the weeks ticked by it seemed unlikely. Then finally I got a reply - she'd been out of the office due to a broken foot. So that was a ray of hope. She asked me what sort of distance I could travel and how many days I still needed to do and so on, I wrote back and haven't heard anything since.

Whilst waiting, I figured I might as well try and get the funding part out of the way: There are grants and bursaries out there to apply for. And absolutely no clue anywhere as to how to go about it. In the end, I picked a phone number I knew was wrong, explained my problem to the nice lady who answered me, and she put me through to the right number. They pointed me at the website I needed to sign up with.

I tried to register at this website, but it claimed I already had. So I phoned them up and asked what they were talking about.

Apparently, I have had an account with them since 1995, when I first went to university. This is when I lived in a different county and didn't know what "email" was. And, being that it was before the dot-com boom, they hadn't known what a website was, either. But they'd modernised since then, and created accounts for all their PAST accounts while they were at it. Without ever thinking of actually telling the owners of those accounts, you understand.

So I got them to tell me my ID number, and between us we worked out which address they had for me (They couldn't tell me, and I had half a dozen to work through.) Then I told them my current email address, because I hadn't had one twelve years ago, which they put onto the system for me, and I was finally then able to work my way through all the possible combinations of my name and place of birth (With middle name, or without? A comma between town & county, or not? etc.) on their website's "Lost your password?" form in order to get it to send me a new password to replace the one I had never actually been issued with before.

The email came through, and I was at last able to log on and set up my various details correctly. Now it was time to fill in the forms.

Three hours later (No joke, no exaggeration) I finished, and submitted the data. They have now written to Lou, because they want to know all about her salary before they decide on how much of a grant I get. This means that she has to go through the exact same rigmarole as I did to get access to her online account, since she also has an account that was created after she graduated but was never told about.

They have also asked me to provide them with two lots of evidence to prove my claims are true: My passport, to prove I'm me - weird, since they've known me for twelve years; and all my share certificates or dividend statements to prove that my "unearned income" assessment is correct, which would be so much easier if I had any shares. Since my only unearned income is the occasional pound or two of interest my bank gives me when it's in a good mood, this could prove tricky.

In the meantime, neither of us has been sleeping very well because one of the springs in our mattress has broken and started poking through. Not a huge issue, you might say, as we can turn it over. True, except it's gone through on that side as well, and we have a "miracoil" system, which means there aren't a whole bunch of springs: There's one continuous length of wire that is bent into all the individual springs. This means that one break is all it takes to knacker half the mattress.

So it's crumpled and pointy and generally uncomfortable. We've made it tolerable by laying a sheet of cordura (very tough, puncture-resistant fabric) I had laying around on top of the mattress, and then put our spare quilt over the cordura, and finally the bedsheet over the whole lot. We've made it through the last week or two this way, and the new mattress should arrive tomorrow.

We might have opted to inflate our camping beds and give the whole thing a miss in order to get a good night's sleep, if only we hadn't had the other problem: Our block of flats has a system of vents leading to the kitchen and bathroom - both of which have no windows, you see. They replaced the whole roof-based system recently as the existing one was broken. This involved replacing the three small fans that were working on the three separate vents with one big one.

We live on the top storey of the flats. The power supply to the roof runs up on the other side of our bathroom wall. See if you can guess where they situated the large, noisy fan?

For the first day or two, the fan wasn't fully-connected, so we had a rare chance to enjoy all the smells of our downstairs neighbours as they wafted through the vents, whilst enjoying the experience of a nausea-inducing vibration coming down from the roof. Our neighbours smoke, and Lou has lung damage, so it's not a happy situation.

But then they got the fan fully-connected, and the smell died away as the air was sucked out of the flat rather than drifting into it. It is most definitely being sucked out. You could under no circumstances fail to appreciate this whilst standing in the bathroom, unless you were rather forgetful and assumed that you were in fact using a bathroom adjoining a large ship's engine room. It genuinely is THAT noisy.

So we got one of the Resident's Committee people in, and she agreed it was too noisy and must be sorted. She called the landlord, and he popped round and agreed it was too noisy. He phoned the people who had installed it, and asked them (a) why it was so noisy, and (b) why the Hell they had installed it directly above his flat?

So now we understand that the fan still needs to be "properly tuned" which will involve slowing it down, which will change the frequency of the vibration so that we'll hopefully no longer be made physically sick by it, and also result in quieter, possibly even silent running.

Which will be a great relief to us, and also mean that we don't have to keep going out into the hall and flicking the switch on the power supply to shut the damn thing down overnight so we can get what sleep is still possible on our broken mattress.

This has the downside of meaning that the place reeks of smoke come morning, but it's about our only option until they fix (and, with any luck, move) the blasted thing.

So all-in-all, this isn't going to go down as one of the happiest periods of our life, really. I'm maintaining my usual sunny disposition by gloating over how badly things are going to screw up at work in a few months time (after I and several of my co-workers have already left) as a result of particularly PHB-style management.

It's not doing much for the spirits of my less-nimble colleagues who are still going to be working in an understaffed office when a whole load of bad decisions land on them, of course, but you can't please everybody