We left Delwyn with high expectations as he had been assured that both sorts of window cutters were going to turn up. Did it run smoothly from now on? Read on to find out.........
9 March: It's
Sunday - the Big Day. They should be here any minute; well, perhaps any hour;
well, perhaps any day now. You’ve guessed it, nobody turned up.
10 March 2014 Telephoned
Shirley who said that she had tried to telephone on Saturday to let us know
that they had the window cutting tool but could not get a window cutting person
who wanted the overtime and was prepared to come out on a Sunday. My patience
was now getting pretty thin, and we agreed that the job would be done on 20
March. This gave them ten days to get their act together. What do you think
happened?
19 March: A lorry
from Morrison’s, contractors to National Grid plc, arrives and drops off some
road signs and safety barriers. Things
are looking up.
20 March: 08:30 Two men from Morrison’s arrive to install the
gas pipe.
Have
we been here before?
09:30
We had two men looking at a metal pipe
in a big hole, one of them on the telephone. After half an hour the one not on
the telephone came to the door to say they had not been able to contact the
window cutter who was supposed to cut the window in the pipe. They said that they would not leave until the
job was finished.
10:30
A third man arrived – the
supervisor. He assured me that we would
have gas today.
14:30 Another lorry arrives. It's the window cutter and guess what? No,
you’re wrong. He HAS got a window cutter and in fifteen minutes he's cut the window
and gone.
You might ask where had he been all
morning, and where was he going to in such a hurry. Well, apparently, the story goes like this:
§ The Morrison’s
scheduler had sent two men to dig a hole for me, but had not arranged for a window-cutter
man.
§ The
scheduler had sent the window-cutter man to another job in Suffolk, but had
failed to send any diggers to that site.
§ So, my two
men stood around for half a day looking at the hole in the road, wondering
where the window cutter had got to.
§ At that time,
the window cutter was at another job, looking at a tarmaced road and wondering where
the diggers had got to.
OK, back to the best bit of the story. We now have
a window in the black metal pipe, and we can see the yellow gas pipe and, hey
presto, they make the connection and we now have gas. But wait – the tale does not end there.
You might now be thinking that as
we’ve got the gas, what else could go wrong? Don't forget that we’re dealing
with Morrison/National Grid.
21 March: A lorry
arrives with two men who filled the hole with some hardcore and tamped it down
with a jump-up-and-down oscillating tamping machine, commonly known as a “whacker”.
Very efficient. They then left saying that the tarmac guys would be along
tomorrow.
“What's
wrong with that?”, you ask.
Well,
later the same day a lorry turned up. The driver had three bags of permanently
soft tarmac, which he broke up into small pieces and put into the hole. He
raked this with a shovel to get it as smooth as possible, as that was the only
tool he had brought. Now, I have just
said that the only tool he had brought was a shovel (no whacker). So he whacked
the tar down with his shovel and said that it would be all right, as the
passing cars would do the rest.
Three weeks after this episode, the proper tarmac job was undertaken.
Oh, I nearly forgot.
24 March: British Gas
telephoned to ask if they could postpone the installation of the meter until
later in the week, and we agreed that “later in the week” would be the next
day.
I
then received a second telephone call from British Gas saying that their
engineer was unable to install the meter tomorrow. I was asked if it would be convenient for
their guy to come along and install it within the next forty minutes. I said YES. He duly arrived and in half an hour we had
gas and a gas meter.
HAVE YOU
HEARD ANYTHING LIKE IT? AS THEY SAY,
“YOU COULDN’T MAKE IT UP”.
All of the above took place just to get gas connected from the road
onto the property.
I’m pleased to say that we had a
happy ending to the above challenges. We
had booked a qualified gas fitter who was amenable to fitting in with the
ever-changing dates. He was recommended
by “Josephine” at the “Blue Lion”! and when
came to give us the estimate he talked the technical talk and seemed to know
what he was doing.
Did he know what he was doing? YES
HE DID. What a fantastic installation. He was pedantic about where the pipes
went and how the bends looked. He even cleaned out the inside of the existing
central heading pipes with a big magnetic machine called a “Power Flush”.
I would recommend this guy to
anyone. He now does our annual service.
We had to have him back when we had
a leak from the central heating under the floor, for which we had to make a
claim on the insurance.
That, however, is ANOTHER STORY!
Thank you to Del for his story which I'm sure we all find amusing but probably nearly drove Del to drink!
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