I just spent an hour of my life that I'll never get back on the phone with eBay customer service. The poor "team member" who picked up my call had the sketchiest command of English I have ever heard in a call-centre employee, and the script she was obviously working from was of zero help to her as it did not cover the thing I wanted to talk about; i.e., refunding the sum I was charged for shipping an item through eBay's Global Shipping Program because the seller sent it direct by US Mail.

What I really wanted was to get eBay to use some of the money to pay the seller his postage and give me the rest, but that was way too complicated. In the end, I "escalated" the issue (as they say these days) to talk to a manager, who promised to give me my money back. I wrote to the seller and asked him for his PayPal address so I can pay him myself.

Sometimes I quite dislike the 21st Century.

Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, we have just learned that all kinds of materials that we were used to putting in the recycle box are not, actually, recyclable at all. So parsing the garbage just got more complicated.

The new manuscript has landed and I am hard at work, except when I'm reading the Mudcat. It's the same book I was working on almost two years ago; it's been in production limbo while the part of the Department of National Defence that was supposed to publish it collapsed and apparently died. Army Headquarters is still struggling to get something for its money, so I'm back on the job.

As Flanders and Swann once sang, "It all makes work for the working man to do."