Finding a
Plumber ©
By Michael
Casey
As we all
know a good plumber is worth more than Gold itself, and the prices they charge
are of that order too. Last week we heard a drip drip drip but could not
discover the origin, we went outside to put something in the bins and all was
revealed, the overflow of water was coming from the upstairs central heating
feeder tank. So now all we had to do was find a plumber. But hang on our
central heating was covered by insurance, or so I thought.
Insurance is
a strange thing, you are covered or you are not covered, it’s like your
boyfriend stealing the duvet, sometimes your bum is exposed and a target, other
times you are totally covered and as snug as a bug in a rug, while he shivers
on a mountain ledge. So your insurance cover is like that, various degrees of
coverage or exposure. So joyfully I rung my insurance company, I assumed I had
total coverage, only it turned out my bum was exposed, and no joyful target for
my wife, it was exposed and not covered by my insurance company.
In plain
English, my new boiler was covered by my boiler insurance, but my header tanker
and its float, they could have been on the Moon. They were not covered, but the
insurance company could cover them, if I had them fixed first. As for my
radiators they were not covered either, apart from my pants covering them while
they dried and filled the room with steam. So now you know.
So the hunt
for a plumber began, which was almost as difficult as Stanley’s quest for Dr Livingstone. You always go
on recommendation for plumbers and builders and maybe even priests. So we got a
recommendation for Peter, who I thought
was the same Peter who did my sister’s central heating. Only it wasn’t, it was
cool West Indian lad, who said “later” which was supposed to be an hour later,
but turned out to be never. Maybe he had something to do, but not for us. Then
we had another plumber in mind, an Indian guy who’d done up several houses in
the neighborhood and fixed our kitchen gutter. He was going to do a garden
gate for us as well, but the cost was too much in my opinion. So I made a
garden gate myself, out of the old slats from my pine bed. As for the Indian
his phone was no longer receiving calls, so option 2 had gone.
Option 3 was
look online, so I found a fancy plumber and told them what I wanted, a quote
for a new float in my feeder tank. They replied with an automatic email, they
even had a wonderful website, telling on a ticker whose toilet had been
unblocked. Only my job was too small for
them as I never heard back from them.
Time had
passed and my hair had grown longer, no I hadn’t turned into Rapunzel, maybe
more like the Wolfman, so I gave in to my Shanghai wife’s nagging and went for a
haircut. We are blessed with maybe 13 hairdressers where I live, half being for
women and half for men. So I went to the Italian barber, only he was shut. So
then I went to the Russian barber, only she was shut too. I had spotted a new
Pakistani barbers while I was trying to have my haircut, so I decided to go
there. He had a certificate on the wall proving he’d had some college training
in hairdressing skills.
I was pleased
as his hairdressing skills matched the certificate on the wall, so that was
great. We got talking and he told me how his cousin encourage him to try
barbering. I was about to guess what he’d done previously when he told me, taxi
driver. I smiled I remembered all my taxi drivers when I’d been working at
CPNEC Birmingham, we had had a great relationship, they came in fast and I got
them out ever faster. Keep the customer satisfied was my policy, get our guests
where they wanted to be, and keep the drivers happy too. Most of my drivers
were Pakistani lads.
As my hair
was cut and the years fell away I asked on impulse, do you know any plumbers?
He picked up a card from the shelf in from of him, plumbers. So my quest to
find a plumber had ended, in the barbers shop with my ½ price haircut. I rung
the number on the card and then 2 days later the plumber arrived.
The plumber
Mr J was young and strong, he needed be, as my header tank was in a strange
position, it was in my bedroom about 8 feet off the floor. Mr J had to remove
my mattress and part-dismantle the bed so he could get the ladder up under the
tank. As I’ve still not fully recovered after my bypass and my arthritis means
I cannot exert myself too much. Mr J did the business and my central heating
header tank float was replaced. And my bed put back together again. All for £50
and in one hour.
I did offer him
a cup of tea, he couldn’t stop, so he said maybe next time, I said I hoped I
never saw him, we laughed. I wasn’t laughing the night before, some bastard had
tried to break into our home, but that’s another story.
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