PEC Metering – Shocking Customer Service

My flat uses prepaid electricity. I purchased a prepaid voucher from Pick ‘n Pay, however, being the blondie that I am, I used my old (incorrect) meter no. from my old flat (in the same complex). After realizing the mistake I had made, I notified PEC Metering of the problem. The initial response was their asking if I could possibly arrange a scheme with the tenants of the wrong meter no. I spoke to the tenants but they had enough electricity and would only need again at the end of the month. Plus, I don’t like relying on other people for money-related issues. I went back to the company, explained the situation and asked if they could deactivate the voucher and reissue/credit with a new one. The response back was that they could do this, however they would have to request a voucher and it would take a while as they have to be cautious of fraud at all times. Totally understandable, however I didn’t receive any word until I contacted them to ask what was happening four days later! The story had now changed, the woman assisting me was very rude, and I was informed that they “won’t” refund the voucher and that I would have to continue with the arrangement with the tenants.

What would the situation be if I had previously lived in a different complex? You can’t tell me that something like this never happens. Not only can people give the wrong number, but cashiers could also input the wrong code in the shops.

As a company they have the obligation to refund me. I notified the business within 10 days of the unsuitability of the goods. I notified the business of this as part of the Consumer Protection Act, their response was: “The problem lies with the fact that our system cannot deactivate a voucher”. How is it possible that a company like this cannot deactivate vouchers or have a system in place to transfer funds.

I have had no luck so far with the other tenants, and have no clue what else to do. I have turned to HelloPeter as a last attempt. If only I could change companies, however, I unfortunately don’t have that option.

Basil Pesto – How-to

Last night, I made my first basil pesto using basil I grew in my own garden. I’ve been feeling very chuffed, so I thought I’d share how I went about making this simple pesto.

You will need:
Fresh basil leaves (about 2 cups worth). It looks like a lot but once ground down, amounts to very little.
Cheese – preferably pecorino or parmesan (about 1/2 cup).
Extra virgin olive oil – about a 1/2 cup.
Pine nuts (1/3 cup).
A clove or two of garlic.
Salt and pepper to taste.

*Note: Pesto should be made to taste, based on the ingredients you have, so you can adjust the ingredients to your taste.

How-To
Using a mortar and pestle, grind down the basil with some of the olive oil. Add more oil whenever it starts to look dry.

Add each ingredient, one by one, grinding again after each addition until it reaches the consistency you want. Remember to scrape the sides in after each addition so everything mixes well.

Have a small taste after each addition so you are aware of how each ingredient affects the flavour.

Another option (which I chose to do last night) is to make a basil pesto mayonnaise. Add the pesto bit by bit into your mayo (I used 4 tablespoons of mayo) and mix well.

It is so delicious, it can be served with anything and everything. You can freeze the pesto, but if you do, rather omit the cheese as it doesn’t freeze well.

Enjoy!

Basil Pesto

Oreo Cheesecake

I recently made this for some friends and it’s a deeelicious, rich cheesecake – best served with a glass of cold milk.

Ingredients:

24 Oreo cookies, divided
3 tbsp butter, melted
3 x 250g packs Philadelphia brick cream cheese, softened
3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
3 eggs

Method:

1. Heat oven to 180′C. Place 16 cookies in a ziploc bag, remove excess air and seal. Finely crush cookies by rolling a rolling pin across the bag. Place in bowl. Add butter and mix well. Press firmly onto bottom of a 9-inch springform pan.

2. Beat cream cheese, sugar and vanilla in a large bowl with an electric mixer on medium speed until well blended. Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating just until blended after each addition. Chop or crush remaining 8 cookies. Gently stir half of the chopped cookies into cream cheese batter. Pour over prepared crust; sprinkle with remaining chopped cookies.

3. Bake for 45 minutes or until centre is almost set. Cool. Refirgerate for 3 hours or overnight.

Manny the Mortician(s)

There are two morticians in the hospital, both with the same name – Manny. They smell vaguely of cabbage and death in a bone marrow stew. Either they never wash their hair, or they rub their heads on decomposing dead bodies, but their hair is literally dripping with oil, sweat (and occasionally faeces). You hardly ever hear them speak, but when you do, you can be certain that they will crack a really insensitive joke and burst out laughing – displaying their missing and rotten teeth. I remember being distraught after seeing and caring for my first dead patient, and through my tears, I saw brown teeth smiling at my ‘special delivery’.

The scariest situation is when you get into an elevator with one of them. It’s just you, a mortician, and a cold body covered in plastic and a green cloth. As you can imagine, not much conversation goes down. In fact, I have never said a word to either Manny for fear of them stealing my soul. Now, imagine actually getting stuck in the lift with one of them. Considering this is a government hospital, it is safe to say the lifts will stop working a couple times a week. I say I take the stairs to maintain my fitness. This is a lie.

If you go down to the morgue, you have to be careful because if the morticians see you walk into one of the big fridges, they hide under the trolleys and grab your leg unexpectedly (meaning you literally need a change of panties). These big fridges are the freakiest thing. They are so cold, and you just see bodies piled on top of each other. Occasionally, a stupid, dumbass nurse will get a body bag for a patient that is too small, and instead of wasting it and getting a bigger one, they will cut a slit through the top of the bag and the bottom so that all you see are feet and tops of heads sticking out. Ever heard of frostbite?

Word on the hospital corridor is that you can hear the sound of ghosts singing at the morgue at night. I walked there on my own one night in an attempt to see, or hear, a ghost. Truth be told, all I heard was my own screams as I ran back to my ward – Cindy had thought it funny to hide behind a wall and jump out at me.

RESUS!

In the hospital, when someone shouts “RESUS!”, it means get your ass into gear and start CPR. The important thing to know is that you cannot perform CPR on someone who is alive. They HAVE to be dead – which apparently, some fully trained nurses don’t even know.

So there I am, working in a Medical ward. I heard “RESUS!” and start running to the room like a child hopped up on pure glucose, only to find one of the highest ranked nurses performing CPR on a patient who was very much alive. The sight of a nurse, sweating and puffing while performing sub-standard CPR on a live patient who is trying to fight her off is an image that makes me sleep well at night.

Trust me, someone putting their full weight (and she wasn’t a small girl) behind their hands, performing chest compressions on your sternum at a rate of around 100 pumps per minute, is effing painful.

Afterward, the nurses all celebrated (in the form of an extended tea break), the fact that the patient survived. I didn’t have the heart to inform them that the patient had been alive all along.

Something Smells Fishy

Working in a surgical ward in the first few days of January guarantees the fact that you will see many “New Year’s Eve/Alcohol-Induced” injuries. Living in South Africa, these injuries are mostly the result of assault.

Night shift handed over to me, and because I was dreaming of my warm bed, I didn’t hear exactly what they said, but gathered that a patient, Brian’s, belongings were in the fridge.

I went to go put a name tag on what I assumed to be colddrink or something along those lines. However, upon opening the fridge, all I found was a brown paper bag, within which was a polystyrene cup. In the polystyrene cup was a nose. A human nose. Trying to (quite literally) put the pieces of this puzzle together, I went on a quest to find Brian. Indeed Brian had no nose. I don’t know what else I was actually expecting. His nose had been bitten off in a fight.

The plastic surgeons soon got to work and realized it would be difficult (and kind of disgusting) to re-attach a nose that had been in a polystyrene cup in a fridge with temperatures that aren’t really regulated. Plus, it was kind of old and shrivelled up.

Instead, the surgeons decided to perform a skin graft and basically just cover the open flesh and bone (rather than let Brian look like a person instead of Michael Jackson). This is the part I never quite understood. They took a skin graft from the back of his head – on his scalp. A scalp which was, I might add, covered in hair. I performed wound care for Brian and it really didn’t look too bad until a couple days after the op, when his nose started sprouting little black hairs. A few more days passed and Brian eventually had a totally hairy nose.

Suddenly though, the hair had disappeared. I was so happy for Brian until I found him in the bathroom shaving his nose with a razor. That explained that, then.

A Romantic Amniotomy

My friend Liz reminded me of this story, and I just had to share it with you..

In labour ward, where I currently work, we receive new medical students every 6-8 weeks who are in their Obstetric and Gynaecology block. It is an academic hospital, so we have to teach them various things – like how to deliver a baby, for example.

Now mostly, these students annoy the crap outta us. Occasionally, we have the really sweet ones, that work hard. Occasionally, one or two of them are hotties. This was one such occasion.

Jeremy was not your typically ‘handsome’ man. But he was cute, and just had something about him. He was a proper charmer. All the Sisters had a soft spot for him, and I think he knew that. In retrospect, he was skinnier than me, shorter than me, and blind as a bat.

One day, Jeremy came and asked me to teach him how to perform an Amniotomy. Basically, in an amniotomy, you break open the bag that baby is sleeping in to speed up labour. One of the complications is that the cord that supplies the baby with oxygen and nutrients can slip out the vagina, thereby putting the babies life at risk.

I talked Jeremy through the procedure, and he did brilliantly. I told him to make sure there was no cord before removing his hand from the vag. Jeremy breaks the bag, and suddenly looks at me from behind his coke-bottle glasses with big eyes and says, “I feel the cord.”

Now, Jeremy was pretty new at this so I had to make sure he was actually feeling a cord. So, I donned my sexy blue, plastic apron. I seductively pulled gloves onto my hands, and lubed up my fingers with KY Jelly. I explained to the mom what was going on, and I could tell she could sense the sexual tension in the air. I had to stand in front of Jeremy, quite close, and lean over slightly. *Visualize Jeremy teaching me to play pool*

I put my hand on top of his, and slipped my fingers through his. There we stood, fingers interlocked in another woman’s vagina. Jeremy looked down at me from behind his coke-bottles and said “This is so romantic.”

I admittedly lingered there a little longer than necessary, knowing that there wasn’t actually a cord – but Jeremy didn’t need to know that, did he?

Speed Dating!

Last night, I attended my first Speed Dating event (just like in the movies). I dragged my fellow single friend, Stef along for moral support. This is my experience..

It took place at Outer Limits, a restaurant in Fourways. There are two age groups: 22-35 and 30-45 (I was in the former group). All the ladies are spread throughout the restaurant and allocated numbers. The guys rotate through the restaurant. The dates last 5-7 minutes on average, while you try to get to know each other, have random conversations and figure out if there’s a ‘spark’. Everyone receives a scorecard on which you rate each date: Yes/No/Friends/Business at the end of the 5 minutes. Thereafter, the organizer (@SerenaCG) goes through the scorecards and takes note of all the matches. You then get an e-mail notifying you of these matches.

It’s sooo interesting to realize how big an impact first impressions have on you. Plus, seeing how easy it is to develop chemistry with someone within the first minute versus using your intuition and immediately knowing when someone is just not the guy for you is refreshing.

During a quick food break, some ladies congregated in the bathroom and had a quick gossip sesh about the guys. We discussed who we liked, gave tips, told eachother who to avoid, laughed over the different anecdotes. It was so much fun. Shortly after that, I saw this on twitter and burst out laughing..

“@TarintheSavage You know the group at ur speed dating session is bad when the ugly girl on the phone in the toilet says “I’d rather masturbate tonight”. Uhm”

Sure, there were the strange ones.. The guy who spoke about his mom more than himself; the guy who had an entire conversation with my boobs (they weren’t really enjoying it, though); the guy who literally had nothing to say for the whole five minutes. Awkward.

In the same breath, though, there were some great guys, lots of ‘em very sweet. The one guy had me laughing for literally the entire five minutes. I barely spoke to him because I was laughing so much.

Needless to say, I had a great night. It was just so much fun. I always say you should try everything once, and I’m glad I did it.

If you’re single, and looking for something new, exciting and fun to do, I really recommend speed dating.

I went through the company Fast Date – check their website out here: www.fastdate.co.za, or follow them on twitter: Fastdate.

Happy dating! <3

Maggots for Breakfast

I once had to change an old man’s nappy, before transferring him to a different ward. So, I take off the dirty nappy and open his legs to wipe him and I see holes in his ‘gooch’ area opening up – they must have been about 4cm deep and I could see into him. That’s generally not a good thing, what with all the TB, sputum, vomit and crap found in a Medical ward.

I opened his legs even wider to further inspect whatever damage was present and maggots suddenly started running out of the holes and started going everywhere. Up his legs, all over the bed, on my hands. I ran out gagging. I went to call the Sister-in-charge and she tells me, “There’s nothing we can do. Just close him up with a new nappy and take him to the other ward.” I do as told by my senior.

In the other ward, I informed the staff about the maggots. Their jaws dropped and I swifty got the hell out of there before they could change their minds about accepting the patient.

I now wish you all a very pleasant breakfast, lunch or supper. x

The Week That Was..

So, what with the week from hell I’ve had (and this seems to be a recurring problem for me), I thought I’d rather take a lighter, happier reflection on the things I’ve enjoyed this past week..

What I’ve Listened To..

I made a mix CD recently with a range of awesomely chilled out songs.. Some artists featuring on it: John Mayer, Maroon 5, A Perfect Circle, Mayday Parade, Muse and the ever awesome How to Destroy Angels.  Checkout one of my fave songs of theirs here..  Nothing quite beats driving alone, belting out some of your favourite songs.

What I’ve Watched..

I’ve started watching ‘Arrested Development’ again to try abate my excitement from reading this.  I love how quick the humour is.  Do yourself a favour and check it out.

What I’ve Done..

I’ve been really busy with work and trying to balance some semblance of a social life, but the highlight of my week was a catch-up with my two best friends.  I guarantee that without them in my life I would likely be a very sad person, and certified insane.

What I’ve Read..

In case you didn’t see my tweets/facebook, I recently acquired a Kindle.  After downloading as many free books as I could find, the poor girl in me decided to splurge on the classic ‘The Notebook’ at $7.99.  I’m loving my Kindle and have requested a cover for it (with built-in light, of course) from the parents as a birthday present.

Where I’ve Gone..

As part of the whole ‘single life’, I’ve managed to try out a couple new restaurants/bars/stripclubs, etc – you know, as one does.  I must say, a place that stuck out for me was Tony’s Spaghetti Grill in Randpark Ridge.  It has a really chilled and laidback feel to it, delicious cocktails and amazing food.  You have *got* to try out their Mozarella Frittas – they are incredible.

What I’ve Realized..

I’ve had a couple requests for advice/help regarding medical issues, personal issues, relationship issues, daddy issues, etc.  I love giving advice and helping people when asked.  I’ve realized I could one day combine my love of helping people with my love of writing.  I haven’t quite figured out what format that would be – most likely an advice column – but I’m loving the idea.

What I’ve Concluded..

Sure, I’ve been having a rough time lately and still feel totally in limbo with regard to many things.  However, I have decided that I still have time, I need to stop living life before it happens and rushing through everything, so for now, this is my new motto (and this picture is plastered over anything and everything I look at as a reminder)..

What did you all get up to this week?