Fixing, selling, moving. It’s more work than a divorce.

Mr. V. was up till nearly 2 am this morning applying the base coat to the laundry room floor. We have yet another bin full of construction detritus in the back lane, and yesterday I got Future floor wax into the small cuts in my hand I sustained on the weekend hacking back the tea rose bush that has refused to do anything but grow leaves full of black spot.

This morning I have to call the building service company to let them know that leaving a black streaks on the bottoms of the sky lights is not okay.

Then it’s on to more windows, more floors, more paint touch ups, and the beginning stages of staging so we can create pictures that look like our house should be in a magazine. Though in our case I think that will mean the back pages of Readers’ Digest.

I am tired, distracted, wish it was all over, and have no idea when I will next post to this blog.

It looks like Telus’ pursuit of Bell has ended. The two telecom giants will not create a “wireless cash cow” to milk Canadians. At least not any time soon.

Maybe now that all the excitement has ended, they will return my call. Last Thursday, Telus promised me a supervisor would contact me “within 24 to 48 hours” about my complaint.

Well, it’s Tuesday, Telus. I know you like to take weekends off. That’s okay, especially since you are so busy every weekday thinking up new ways to disappoint your customers. And I understand what your worker bee told me–that the supervisor would just be mouthing the worker bee’s message of last Thursday, and have nothing new to say.

I’d still like to think you’re a company that keeps its word; so call me, please.

A love poem to realtors, Vancouver’s favourite bottom feeders:

Basements will have your dream home
most desired streets.

Extensive updated
could be rented very convenient
almost a double garage.

Steps to trans basement can be easily suit
hot water tank within a year.

House in excellent east side
Champagne Mall.

Suite on the attic
great to hold
garage is perfect for avoiding rainy days.

Good tenants down which is good mortgage helper
all sizes and ages need TLC.

Two storey bungalow
includes roof, windows, kitchen, furnace, appliances, garage & more
a ground level door leading to the outside.

Character seller having lived here
eloquently updated kitchen.

Partly renovated few years back
recently updated with updated kitchens and baths.

Huge covered sundeck with cover.

Raise your family here with proximity
it has back lane.

House sits on the new City of Van vision
lots of stain, glass windows, wood floor
baths with new appliances.

All meas. approx.
five minutes walk to skytrain station, shopping & everywhere else.

Act quickly it’s a keeper.

Google “I hate Telus” and you get 1,060 hits. Google “Telus Sucks” and you get 2,120. And the way the Google bots visit my site I’ll be adding one more hit to each of these strings before you can google “Telus is Satan.”

My relationship with Telus has been like a bad marriage that has gone on and on and on. Until the summer of 2003, it was bearable. Then the fat hit the fan. That was the summer Telus cooked up another shareholders’ wet dream–layoffs and service cuts.

I still have the letter I wrote to Telus President, Darren Entwhistle, out of exasperation, enumerating the countless hours over that summer I was bereft of the connectivity that was essential for the work I was doing, the calls that were cut off after a Telus rep had put me on hold, and that weren’t returned, the number of times I disconnected then reconnected the modem, released and renewed IP addresses, switching from static to dynamic IP addresses, the hours I spent on hold waiting to speak to a Telus rep, and on and on and on.

One Telus employee told me the reason I was having a problem was likely a conflict between my modem and my CD burner. Another hung up on me mid-sentence. Granted, I had turned into a seething beyatch by then, but aren’t the front line employees supposed to be trained to deal with the beyatches and bastards?

Finally, as a result of my letter to Entwhistle, a service person showed up and fixed whatever was wrong with the DSL connection. And I got a letter from Telus’ Executive Customer Relations Manager, Erica Sherring, who offered a $20 credit on my next bill.

I wrote back to say that a $20 credit was insultingly low, given what Telus had put me through, and further describing the hell they had created. I never heard from them again, nor, so far as I can tell, did I ever receive the proffered $20 credit. But life moves on, and the media were full of far worse Telus stories than mine that summer. Besides, it was too much trouble to switch providers, so I stuck with the devil I knew.

From then till the summer of 2005, Telus’ service was reasonably good, if occasionally spotty. When Mr. V. moved in that August, we decided to go wireless. I called Telus and they made what they described as an incredible offer. They would give me a router, and I could pay them $44.95 a month.

By the time the Telus router arrived, we’d had time to think about their offer. We mailed their router back to them, because we’d purchased our own. Neither of us wanted to be any more beholden to Telus than we absolutely had to be.

Over the past couple of years, Telus wirelss service has generaly been okay, but not without its trials. On a semi-regular basis, it would slow to what felt like old dial-up speed. Sometimes it would clog up altogether, but this was generally fixed by unplugging the modem and router and clearing out the static electricity.

When this didn’t work I would call Telus for assistance. The Telus reps were pleasant and polite, but the calls always came down to the same thing: Telus couldn’t help me, because they don’t support the model of Linksys router I was using.

Eventually I gave up on looking to Telus for help. And then Shaw started to call with an an offer that was hard to refuse. Mr. V. and I decided to go for it. The installation of Shaw High Speed went without a hitch, as did the switchover of our telephone.

When I called Telus to cancel our high speed service, I was transferred to “L&R” (their Loyalty and Retention Department.) A very pleasant woman was supportive of my decision, given my dissatisfaction with Telus. When I assured here there was nothing Telus could do to retain my business, our call ended pleasantly.

Ten minutes later the phone rang. It was the Telus L&R rep, and she had bad news. Telus records stated I had a contract for ADSL, and they would require a $120 payment to cancel it. A bit taken aback, and thinking quickly, I remembered the $150+ unused time I have on my Telus Mobility Pay and Talk account. I suggested she could arrange an inter-company transfer, knowing I’d never use those minutes.

(As an aside, a couple of months ago I’d spoken to Telus Mobility about upgrading my cell phone package, but I decided not to go ahead when they advised that they would only credit me a maximum of $100 of my unused Pay and Talk credits on a new plan. Why Telus is allowed to get away with this sort of policy is beyond me.)

The Telus L&R rep said she couldn’t help, and suggested I call Telus Mobility. I did, and explained my proposition. The Mobility rep put me on hold, and then I was mysteriously cut off. No one from Telus Mobility has called me back to follow up on their dropped call, but that is not surprising, even if they are the telelphone company.

I forgave Telus when they contiued to charge us $44.95 each month, and didn’t offer us a camera, an Ipod, or a computer. If Teus wanted to be aggressive to attract new business  and passive when it comes to retaining existing business, who was I to question their business model?

But really, having to pay Telus a $120 fee so I can end a relationship with a vendor whose service has ranged over the years from abysmal to shoddy to barely acceptable? When they didn’t even give me a crappy little Ipod Nano?

Do I really have to pay Telus to go away just because they say I have a contract with them? It does sound like a bad marriage. With an abusive spouse. Well, I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.

If this house was a living breathing organism, I would be its food. And it would have an eating disorder. And indigestion. And irritable bowel disorder. And it would choke on me. Take that, you selfish house!

I might have some time to live, and post, in a few days. And then again, I might not.  Who knows what house surprises are in store?

The time has come to say good-bye. To Telus, that is. Shaw has wooed us and won us, and their technician comes tomorrow to install the new (”free”) modem and whatever else they have to do to have our telephone and high speed business as well as our cable. We don’t like Shaw any more than we like Telus, but at least their price was right. Here’s hoping their data transfer is more dependable than Telus’ has been.

The way these things go, it would be foolish to assume that all will be well. It remains to be seen whether Shaw’s modem will talk to our router, at least right away. This means Vancouveriste may be silent for a while. We’ll be back as soon as we can.

Short answer: money. Long and crazy-making answer: Vancouver un-real estate.

It’s a cold cruel real estate market out there, but it’s official. Our house is for sale. The agent has measured the rooms. The renos are not quite done, but the open house is slated for the second weekend of July. We have been spending every spare moment and every spare molecule of spit and polish to help the renos along.

Almost every day since late March there has been someone in the house working on something. I’m beginning to feel like the Candace Bergen character, Murphy Brown, who always came home to find Eldin, the house-painter, at work.

It’s time for Mr. V. and me to move on, though we’re not quite sure where. We’ve spent a lot of time studying the market, and we don’t know if we’ll find what we want at a price we can afford in Vancouver. “Reno’d” bungalows and “roomy” townhouses do not set our hearts to pounding.

We thought we might have found the perfect house at the perfect price on Albert Street in Burnaby. It was so cute in the Realty Link pictures.

Unfortunately pictures don’t tell the whole story; the house was across the alley from a Pizza Hut. The smell of cooked cheese wafting across the alley was too much for me, though Mr. V. thought at first he could live with it. Then I reminded him no matter what we cooked for dinner, the cheese would always be with us.

Our search continues. I’ll keep you posted.

Shallow, self-involved “adults” are caught up in a summer of sex and discontent. This film might have made a good black comedy if the filmmakers hadn’t been so concerned with providing social commentary. We are hit over the head with the oppressive Will Lyman narration and the matrons reading Mme. Bovary at their book club. All the same very watchable, other than the ghastly climax.

There have been plenty of jokes about changing the title of this film to reflect its mediocrity, and Deniro’s sophomoric directorial achievement did leave a lot to be desired.

Matt Damon (subbing in for the unavailable first-choice diCaprio) created an Edward Wilson who was wooden and lacked nuance. Angelina Jolie was miscast as Wilson’s wife, who mysteriously transitioned from hyper-sexual Clover to sexually averse Margaret. Did she see nothing more than a sperm donor in Damon’s character?

The “untold story” of how the east coast skull and bones establishment set up and ran the CIA remains largely untold. It deserves a better telling than this long (2 hours and 48 minutes), circuitous, and covert tale.

When the teacher is ready, the student appears?

A buddy movie in which nuanced performances from Ryan Gosling, who plays the drug-dependent teacher,  Shareeka Epps who plays the student who almost loses her way, and Anthony Mackie who plays the dealer with half a heart, create a gritty, urban version of “Lost in Translation.”