Chatterbox Wednesday

Wordle 193 3/6

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1st game.

Mwahahahaa.

Memes of the year...

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/dec/27/the-viral-quiz-of-the-year-how-well-do-you-know-the-memes-of-2021


6/11 - proving that the days spent looking through the pilea of shite memes wasn't entirely wasted*

*unlike you lot over Xmas**

**not you, tenthenemy , of course

5/11

10/11.

I was very pleased with this, until I remembered I did it the other day.

Harumph.

I have the bat rona. FFS.

4 guesses correct. A lot of the questions I didn't even understand.

Got any cool stuff?

How do you feel about children?

My advice is make really really sure there are no flies near the teleporter before unleashing the venus fly trap. You do not want to compound any accidents by being chased by a carnivorous plant.

MrTids origin story starring Tom Holland coming to Netflix soon

Greetings from the secret island.

Contrary to yesterday's header I'm not waiting for the banks to open just yet. That's because I'm still doing time in quarantine gaol for another week. That's probably how long it will take for my blood pressure to normalise after a rather stressful journey. Let me regale you with the travails of my travel.

The day before my flight I took the mandatory PCR test at a pharmacy and paid an arm and a leg for a quick turnaround. Evening came, the pharmacy was about to close, and my test result was still missing. Phoned them and was told that there had been a delay in sending the test off but that the result would come in later that evening and if not I could get in touch on the morning of the flight. I breathed a sigh of relief when a few hours later the email with the result showed up because I needed to upload it and proof of my vaccination with a travel form for the German authorities.

Naturally I wanted to print out the documentation but I found that Greta had put a curse on my printer to prevent me from stealing her future by killing trees. Downloaded the printer driver to my new laptop, printer driver couldn't locate the printer. After an hour of checking cables and googling solutions I accepted defeat and decided to rely on my mobile phone if I needed to show documentation to the authorities. I could have probably used my old laptop to print the stuff but it was already very late, I still had to finish packing, and I was fed up.

Things went okay at the airport. It turned out that without the negative PCR test they wouldn't even let you board the plane, so from a virus transmission point of view it was probably the safest flight I've ever been on. I was standing in the check-in queue next to an elderly couple from Munich who told me how they had been through the same panic of arranging a PCR test at short notice after Germany declared the whole of the UK a "virus variant area" at the weekend. They had paid an arm and two legs for theirs and it hadn't even been an express test like mine. I felt slightly less ripped off but the fact remains that the government is allowing anyone to set up a mobile lab in their living room and mint money. In Germany there has recently been a crackdown on dodgy Covid testing labs, but not before a bunch of cowboys made loads of Kohle, Kies, Moos, Schotter and Mäuse. But don't feel bad for them, because after their test labs scheme got rumbled they have now moved on to fleecing the tax payer by running dodgy vaccination centres.

As instructed I had made a note of the reference number of the German travel form I had filled in online, but one didn't get a confirmation email or a copy. Luckily I had taken a screenshot of the completed last page that I was able to show at passport control in Munich because as it turned out the reference number did sod all. Additionally my vaccination status and the negative PCR test results had gone straight into the bowels of German bureaucracy, to be shat out who knows where. I had to produce both of them yet again or risk being put onto a plane straight back to Plague Island. This is where I wished I had spent the time to print everything out, because for whatever reason I was unable to open the email with the attached PCR test result. The Bundesgrenzschutz lady who had already been in a foul mood was getting impatient and ominously started consulting her colleague while I was fumbling with my mobile phone and sweating big drops. I felt a veritable Assyrian palace relief when I was able to open the attachment eventually.

The grumpy border control woman then supplied me with a pile of paperwork and told me where to go to get another PCR test before boarding my connection flight because clearly they thought that one cannot trust the Tommies and their test results. At the testing station I had to scan in a QR code (I have learnt that German authorities are very keen on these) and fill in another long and complicated form by typing on my tiny mobile phone keyboard. Another passenger was struggling to get the QR code recognised and I left him to his fate. I assume that he now lives at Munich airport since he was unable to leave.

I only had a cup of coffee at Birmingham airport and hadn't eaten anything all day except for a small piece of complimentary Lufthansa chocolate, so I wasn't too pleased that the lady at the testing station informed me that I wasn't allowed to eat anything before the test while she herself was having a Leberkäsesemmel with ketchup for lunch. The sight of that Leberkäsesemmel left me drooling, which probably came in handy for the (throat only) PCR test. More paperwork, more QR codes, and instructions how to access the test result. I barely had time to check out the facilities at the airport before my connection flight started boarding. By now I was fairly hungry and devoured another tiny piece of chocolate on the flight. Landed at Hamburg airport ravenous and half deaf from the change in pressure. Luckily my brother was there to pick me up and together we got on the city train to Altona, the station where I would be able to board the train towards my mum's secret volcano island lair. My brother supplied me with a handful of lateral flow tests and I managed to access my PCR test result, though once more the QR code didn't work. It was negative. You vin zis time, Tommy.

I raided one of the bakeries at Altona, said goodbye to my brother, and listened to the train conductor berating the passengers over the tannoy for merely thinking about not wearing their FFP2 masks properly and putting the fear of Gott into those without proof of vaccination or recovery. He also reminded them to leave the face masks on whilst eating or drinking although he generously allowed pulling them up briefly when taking a bite or gulp. So at 6 o'clock in the evening I was finally able to eat a Brötchen, chewing furtively behind my Christmas-themed FFP2 face covering.

The next morning I got an email from someone at the local Gesundheitsamt detailing the conditions of my detention. They sent the template for a quarantine diary in which I'm recording symptoms (fever? cough? sore throat? runny nose? shortness of breath? general malaise?) and daily temperature. Once I'm done with the quarantine I'll have to upload the document, so I've turned it into an attractively formatted table complete with emojis (🎅🎄🎁🥳⛄) over the festive period. Hopefully they'll like it. They have their work cut out with plenty of omicron™ infections in the area. None of them were my fault, but at least everyone with omicron is getting the same 14 days quarantine that I'm currently enjoying.

Oh, and Lufthansa has cancelled my return flight. Great customer service.

tl;dr: Everything is verboten. I feel right at home.

tl;dr cont.: I got called away so many times while writing this post that Shengers has got bat rona in the meantime. I'm sorry, Shenguin , all I can offer to help is a quarantine diary template.