Its Official!!
It's official - I have reached the age of dementia...
My Family is probably the most technologically proficient in the Modern World. I have an husband who is leaps and bounds ahead in all things Apple. I have two daughters who can outstrip anyone who lives in the world of Instagram, Tik Tok and Twitter. I have a Brother-In-Law who was on the apple gravy train before the iPhone was even invented! My brother is such an amazing technocrat - he designed an implemented the Morning Mirror website 22 years ago
And yet I am the Village Idiot.
HeeHoo is remarkably patient, considering the State of the Nation, he tenderly walks me through half witted device problems daily, he has been sorting out my computers and phones since before Steve Jobs passed on.
But then he foolishly left me and went to China!!
All I had to do was to obtain a visa to visit SheHooMustRun in Australia....
My electronic brain is still run by a forked stick, and so I carefully did my homework, knowing that I had to be on the correct Australian Government site. Getting my RAM firmly into action, knowing I can download and upload with great skill, but my user interface might have glaring deficiencies and so I carefully found a genuine bogus visa site.
It had all the correct chatter like the words 'org and gov' that were legit, but it was bogus all the same. So bogus that it cost me seventy one quid!! Doubt only set in when HeeHoo called to say seventy one quid had gone from his bank account to a bank in Poland!!
'Your Australian Visa will be here within twenty four hours' it promised grandiosely. 24 hours passed, 36 hours passed, 48 hours passed and then I began to perspire!! My flight was leaving in five hours time!!!
The ignominy of it all! I was scammed once before with a Visa to Turkey, one would have thought I could have learned my lesson by now!!
Poor SheHooMustRun bore the brunt of my hysteria, pointing me in the right direction towards the very user friendly Australian ETA App. It was four am when I took my passport photo (in my nightie) (snotty nose et al) against the cupboard door. It was a mugshot to equal the one that was taken at Sauerstown Police Station in 2008!!
I am now a fundi on the anatomy of a passport. It only took seven attempts at scanning the data page with the app yelling at me to 'hold the camera still', 'avoid too much light reflection'.
Finding the Biometric Symbol on the front cover of the passport also utilised my last remaining brain cells, and after an hour of solid terror I eventually succeeded.
Someone in Poland is seventy one quid richer and laughing their socks off right now!!