The washing machine in my (rented) flat is becoming unusable. I've been suspecting for ages that it isn't rinsing entirely properly, but last night I had to run two and a bit washes on the same load to get it to do anything even remotely resembling a rinse. I fear a call to the landlord is in order, and that probably means I'll have to be at home at some point to take delivery of a new washing machine.

My broadband connection has been out since some time on Monday evening. I suspect that this is related to NTL's recent letter saying they were going to upgrade my bandwidth by over a factor of two and I didn't have to do anything, although the unbelievably slow phone drone I spoke to this morning outright refused to answer a complicated question like ‘have you upgraded me yet’, preferring instead to take over half an hour to schedule an engineer appointment. Which won't be until Saturday; until then I'm reduced to carrying a floppy disk between work and home containing any data I want to have available on my home machine.

Annoyingly, I had an NTL engineer come round last week, and I did ask him – while he was around anyway – whether my rather old cable modem would be able to cope with the upgraded service. He phoned a friend and said yes. I fear he is not going to be a millionaire.

I've done something horrid to my right forefinger, which is making typing alternately painful and inconvenient (depending on whether I'm currently remembering not to use it). I hope it'll go away by itself and I won't have to shift it by extreme measures such as laying off keyboards…

I collected a new pair of glasses today (my left eye has apparently become marginally less short-sighted, which I suppose is nice). They give me more peripheral vision than the old ones, which is good; but the arms are completely the wrong length and don't hook behind my ears properly. I suspect a trip back to Boots is in order, annoyingly.

Two of the four self-service checkouts in Tesco were out of order when I went there to buy my lunch today. Two days ago it was a different (but overlapping) pair. Is it really so hard to get them all working at the same time?

And my watch, whose battery I had changed a few weeks ago, gave me a battery warning today. It changed its mind fairly fast, but I worry that it might be time for a new one of those as well.

Add that lot to my ongoing NTL woes and my (landlord's) washing machine packing up and you're looking at a pretty annoyed Simon, who's currently hoping to see at least one thing working exactly as designed in the course of this week. Grrr.

On the plus side, this diary is now mirrored into a third location (*waves* to any new readers gained thereby), and today somebody sent me a Sudoku puzzle with the clues arranged into the shape of my initials. (3x3:a4_1_7e2c3d9h5d3_2_8b9_7_6b1f5a9f2a5b7c4a6c1_6_3e, for anyone with a copy of my ‘Solo’ program.)