[planenut]

Some people go through terrible times and suffer, some constantly, so all I will say is I picked up a horrible lurgy last Friday. Today is Wednesday, I am pretty sure. One of the effects is that I have almost totally lost my voice, some would shout "hurrah".

Not feeling too spritely I wouldn't drive, nor fancied the bus, I thought, as I couldn't communicate verbally, something that I could do was online Banking, or so I thought. Due to a major direction change in an upcoming holiday I have had a car hire cost refunded. To protect the original payment, I paid by credit card.

Online, I tried to transfer said fee from my Credit Card account to my Current account, but was not given that as an option. Realizing that I couldn't speak, I started ploughing through the "help" pages eventually resorting to "chatline", which I realize is not a human contact. Finally, the system gave me the option for this thing to go through basically the same system I had, twice, to wake it up. I advised it in various structures of sentences, I could not talk. Finally, and I thought I was getting somewhere, the thing told me it was getting a member of the help team to communicate with me, therefore print/chat.

This "person" came on the chat, and told me to wait while they familiarized themself with the previous exchange of information, this took about eight minutes for them to cover about five inputs. They then declared that they did not fully understand..................eventually, they gave me a phone number to ring, when I asked for an email address, they said that was not an option.

My problem is only temporary, how do those whose impairment is permanent cope?

There, it was a rant, thank you.