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Back in the 1970s I started playing table tennis - there was an after school club at Fairlands Middle School where you could move up the league table by playing the pupils directly above you. I remember having a fierce rivalry with Dave Weekes, whose was better than me (and whose dad ran the bakery - some guys have all the luck). Occasionally you'd hear of some kid who had a ping pong table in their garage. I might even have played on one. Or maybe that was just a beautiful dream.
Imagine being one of those families that has their own table tennis table. Wait, I don't have to. Forty years on I'm allowed to just buy one. Phoebe has really enjoyed playing it on holidays and she's pretty good, so obviously this purchase is for the kids. Though I guess they'll have to play with someone. And yes you can put one side of the table up and play yourself at table tennis. So podcast ahoy and this could be a valid business expense. We're all winners.
We'd set off from Newcastle at 7am (as my substitute tour manager is a dad to young kids and wakes up early regardless like I do) which meant we were home for lunch, which was a nice bonus, though all it meant was that I could get on with bits of annoying admin, most notably having to send my sat nav back to Romania for a second time as it's still freezing up intermittently. Because it seems there's nothing wrong if you stay in one place I imagine they will do the same as last time and just reload the maps and send it back to me and we'll just keep shipping a sat nav between here and Romania for the rest of our lives, or the length of the warranty, whichever is shorter.
I also had to get windscreen wipers for the tour car, so I shot off to Halfords to get that sorted. I knew I could be back in good time for the ping pong table delivery, though the delivery drivers turned up two hours early, just after I arrived back home. They carried the big box through to the garden, took a photo and made me sign their form and were gone. It was only when I opened the box two hours later that I noticed that one of the bits of table was somewhat buckled. And then I saw the other half had some of its marking rubbed off and was pretty badly bent. Somewhere along the line someone had banged this thing up pretty good. My excited children (and let's face it me) started to cry as we had to put the bits away and get in touch with the company I'd bought it from to let them know that we had a defective product. And with that all the admin of sorting out the collection of the busted table and delivery of a new one. I thought I'd be playing table tennis, but I was on the phone to the shop, then their customer service and they then said they'd have to pass it on to the manufacturers. Having played a long range game of table tennis with a sat nav, it looked like the same might happen with this table.
I was pretty annoyed, mainly because there is no way that whoever dropped the thing had not realised that they'd broken the thing, but had nonetheless decided to pretend that nothing had happened.
My dreams of playing ping pong in the next Olympics (and insisting on calling it ping pong) were in tatters. I was glad that one of the photos I sent through to customer services had inadvertently caught Phoebe crying in the background!
i just take some comfort for the fact that three things have broken recently (our wifi, the satnav and this table) and unusually I am not to blame for any of it.
