Friday Again!

The recent death of Prince Philip left the country reeling - although if we are honest, the signs were there. He had been in and out of hospital many times in the past year and things weren't looking good. I met him some forty-two years ago (yes I'm showing my age!) HM Queen Elizabeth II had come to Qatar to open the Doha English Speaking School on the 22 February 1979 and we were all dressed in our Brownie Uniforms - we were going to make the brownie guide promise in front of the Queen and even at nine all I could think was, Surely all she can see is a sea of brown. However, I digress, we'd been released from our (very minimal) duties and I decided I was going to go back to the main building and see if I could get a sandwich - I never could eat very much when I was nervous and I crashed into the legs of this man. Gods, I was so embarrassed - I had a reputation for being clumsy even then - and all I wanted to do was curl up in a ball. However, he picked me up, brushed the sand off my uniform, clapped a hand on my shoulder and said something like, "You're all right. Better get back to your friends." And I was so horrendously grateful that he hadn't made a big thing out of it, that I gave him a very wan smiled and scampered away without looking back. That is my only claim to fame with regard to the Royal Family.

It's been an odd sort of week. I think I wrote in my last Blog that I needed to provide some sort of identification and after much negotiation, I managed to persuade People Per Hour to use my Blue Badge. They agreed, I added the relevant documentation and then they rejected it. I was so annoyed. Plus the fact that you have to be so careful when writing emails because it is far, far too easy to read the wrong phrasing into the written word - as I have discovered to my cost. So I had to write a firm, but fairly nice email asking what was going on. That I thought they'd agreed to my using my Blue Badge Finally, they got their act together and have finally agreed to the documents I've uploaded being acceptable. This means that I can now withdraw large(ish) amounts from my People Per Hour account and only be charged once, rather than having to withdraw minimal amounts and being charged multiple times per withdrawal (about £1.50 each time) which has to be better in the long run.

On a slightly more annoying note, I recently did a Proofreading job for someone and when I returned the document they kept going on about how they'd run it through Grammarly and Grammarly had picked up a number of errors which I couldn't understand as I'd taken especial care to make sure that the Dissertation was correct, she wanted me to continue and adapt the two chapter which hadn't been edited for the full fee. And I did think about it, but then considering the courses I have been on, both Proofreading and Copyediting, I thought Well, why should I? I have over 7 years experience in my field working for a number of publishing companies, I know better than a piece of AI (Grammarly) whether something is correct or not. So I wrote back and said that 'No, I would rather she paid me half the monetary amount and we left it there.' Yesterday as I hadn't heard anything I decided to email her again and as yet I still haven't heard anything.

https://www.servicescape.com/blog/grammarly-vs-human-an-in-depth-review-of-grammarly-compared-to-professional-editors#:~:text=out%20the%20error.-,Results,editor%20still%20won%20this%20round.

As it is now Friday, I will have to leave it for the weekend because as we all know - nothing gets done at the weekend I rather suspect that she wanted something for nothing. I mean I have no idea what this was because she didn't tell me. Even when I asked her to provide details of the errors that Grammarly had picked up she didn't send anything back for me to peruse. I will contact Help/Support on Monday. Even if it's a case of not getting the money because the person doesn't believe I did the work at least then I will know one way or the other.

Writing isn't going terribly well. FanFiction, well that's okay. At least I'm getting stuff down on paper/computer thanks to this nifty little keyboard. I have another which is about the same size, but the problem is that it's not as good. Anyway, you set it up using a Bluetooth connection and that seemed to take forever! Despite my relationship with computers being reasonably good, sometimes they don't do what I need them to. Take setting up an email account so that I can receive my emails through Outlook. Now I know my email address and password and have used them successfully on my Kindle and my laptop. Can I get it to work on my 10" Tablet? No. Every app I have tried to link to AOL has failed abysmally. So in the end I unistalled all of them. I'll stick to checking my emails on my Kindle. I thought that computers were suppposed to make things easier - truthfully, most of the time they do, but things fail to work and it annoys the hell out of me! At least with this keyboard and this software which is like MSOffice but miles cheaper and I don't have to pay a monthly subscription. Things could be much worse of course. This keyboard means that I can do some work even when my body decides that it can't get up today but my brain is going nineteen to the dozen. Admittedly there are channels I can't get which is a little annoying, but I get most of the terrestrial channels so I can watch programmes like Countdown and Pointless. (Yes, I know Pointless is a little silly but it's good fun.)

Well that's this week's Blog for now. Will let you know how things go with this person from People Per Hour. There is still much to do and so many ideas going through my head. Problem is that none of them are original. (Oh to be Bob Kane or Stan Lee!) and yes, if I could go back in time and usurp either of these people then I might just do it!