It turns out he had been checking his credit card account in detail and discovered he was paying the AFL to watch footy from overseas when he wasn’t overseas, and the footy wasn’t even on.
He found a $28 charge — marked “AFL Watch” — that had been popping up every month, and he couldn’t work out what it was. Then he remembered he was in Bali for a week during the finals last September, when he wanted to watch the Blues playing the Demons.
He tells me the normal AFL app doesn’t work when you’re out of the country, so you have to sign up for an overseas version and pay for it. He reckons he signed up for a weekly subscription so he could cancel it after the game. But somehow, he ended up with a monthly subscription, so he’s been paying to watch no footy for five months.
I looked at him, head tilted, as I do when his story doesn’t stack up. Seems to me he forgot to cancel it. He counters that he would never ask for a monthly subscription because he was only there for a week.
Anyway, he set about trying to cancel it, and that didn’t work either. He asked Google how to do it and followed the instructions to tap on his name on the app — it said a “profile” menu would pop up with options, but nothing happened. So he sent a grumpy message to the AFL to fix it.
About this time, I could see that he needed help. I offered myself for a distracting rub of a dog, and that calmed him down. A few deep breaths and he realised he could probably use his computer to sign on to the app instead.
When he did that, everything happened as it should, and he cancelled the subscription he didn’t want. “It’s all too hard, General. What do you do if this sort of thing happens and you don’t have a computer for back-up?”
So it was nearly lunchtime before we headed into town for some shopping. He pulled into Coles at Riverside under the shade, after passing up several spaces where Ford F-150s and Dodge RAMs and other monster utes left no space beside them. Or behind them.
“The utes have got bigger, General, and the car spaces have stayed the same,” he grumbled, as he left me, windows down a bit. But he was even worse when he came out.
He’s been sour on Coles since they abandoned the convenient lane that cut across all the shopping rows at the halfway point; they made each row longer and re-arranged where everything sat, so he had to learn it all over again.
“People are still wandering around in there, General, looking lost after three months. What were Coles thinking?”
I couldn’t answer that. What I was thinking was that he should just go back to bed. Woof!