Would You Believe? (1 of 2)

Next morning, I had a shuttle at 7:45 for Waitomo Caves.  A package deal that included black water rafting.

I'm paranoid about waking up on time.  Since the new watch has no alarm, I have to rely on other means of getting up.  There's a clock radio in my room.  I do a test alarm on it and I'm not happy with the results -- when there's only one station and it gets lousy reception, a clock radio is of minimal usefulness.  Thinking I wouldn't likely wake up to the dulcet tones of static, I set a wake-up call for 6:30.  I was almost tempted to try a test wake-up call, but convinced myself I was being paranoid -- it was an automated system and it would surely call me back.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up at 8:07, having missed wake-up call AND the shuttle to Waitomo.  Strike that.  Imagine my pissed-off-ness.  I called down to the desk and expressed my emotions.  Front desk clerk immediately put me in touch with the manager, who knew who I was, as he'd tried calling me three times when my shuttle came looking for me.  Seems the problem was my phone.

While I tried to dick with all the buttons on the phone to figure out what was wrong, the manager rang back the shuttle company to see if they were still in Rotorua.  They weren't.  Meantime, I discovered the problem was the phone's VOLUME.  Which had been turned down to ZERO.  Exactly why you'd put a volume switch on a telephone (and not mark it, and leave it slid down to the equivalent of "mute") I don't know, but this was obviously the source of my problems.  I couldn't believe that I'd made the connection at Auckland, met my bus for Tamaki, and somehow got f'd over by a freakin' PHONE the next morning.