The heat took its toll at the Heavy Horse Day event and I was feeling pretty ordinary on Monday. Even Dora was very sedate and the girls were concerned she wasn’t well but by Tuesday we all felt a bit better.
On Tuesday I did a First Aid and CPR course along with others from work and our community with Neil from Accidental First Aid based in Warwick. Neil is a great teacher and teaches in a way that enables people to remember what they need to know.
So, I was as prepared as I could be when I was first at the scene of a rollover accident on the way to work on Thursday.
Luckily for everyone no-one was badly hurt. Lucky too that the guy had a Telstra phone and got one bar of service to call for assistance. My phone on the Telstra network refused to work as usual.
I purchased a new iPhone a year ago, mostly because I wanted to take good videos of the sheep for stud sales. It worked for around three months then decided to have either no service or SOS ever since then unless in Warwick or Stanthorpe. Even in Texas I could only get SOS. I have spent days on the phone, in the Telstra Store and even went so far as to meet my sister who took the phone to Apple in Brisbane trying to sort this out to no avail. Telstra refuse to honour the warranty and swap the phone. They all claim there is nothing wrong with it.
I got proof of the problem by getting a screenshot of another phone of the same model with full service at Mingoola but Telstra is not interested. Lodging a complaint was challenging and frustrating, particularly having to deal with someone who could not understand or even write English very well and showed no compassion for my predicament. Apple were at least helpful with good service and call backs, currently trying to isolate if it could be a software issue.
I think the final outcome will be raising a complaint with the Telecommunications Ombudsman. Never again though will I buy anything through Telstra. They offered for me to send in the phone through Telstra Warwick for the tech people to look at but they refused to give me a loan phone. I had never brought an expensive phone before and I won’t again – I will still be paying off the dud for another twelve months.
As I write I am waiting for the delivery on 18 English Leicester sheep from the lady I met at the Heavy Horse Days last weekend. She has sold her property and also needed to sell the sheep. I really didn’t want any more sheep but obviously they wanted me. It was too much of a coincidence. In fact, there was more than one coincidence to come out of last weekend.
The Rare Breeds Trust stand was next door to a small stand selling a book written by R. Jocelyn Doran, “The Call of the Kimberleys.” Being a big bookworm, I had to buy a copy. Chatting to Jocelyn, I discovered that she had owned a property not far from us, Verona Station, which is where we purchased our ancient Massey Ferguson backhoe and Green sheep trailer.
In another bizarre coincidence, for which I am still trying to figure out the reason, this part week I received the Queensland Country Life newspaper in my letterbox instead of Warwick-Stanthorpe Today. I was only a few short chapters into Jocelyn’s book, which I am reading at night to wind down. The copy of Country Life sat stuffed behind the seat of the LandCruiser for a few days, along with the other mail I hadn’t had a chance to bring in, but on Friday morning I sat down for a few minutes at morning tea and looked through the paper.
