November 21, 2004
Fancy a swim?
Ok, so the situation is sort of stabilised, at least for now. The water's off, and the 11th plumber I called is actually on the way (should be here within the hour). The good news is he should be able to fix things enough to be able to put the heating back on. The bad news is he wants £150 for the job. This seems pretty standard - all the other plumbers I managed to speak to ranged from £120-£160, and in theory the home insurance will cover the cost.
This has made me think of a couple of things, though - other than switching insurance companies. I really need to get a UPS for my set-top box and wireless router, so the internet connection stays up when the power trips. No point having batteries in the laptop if I can't connect to the outside world, after all. I also need to get new batteries for the, like, three dozen different torches I have kicking around the house. It was rather silly that in my hour of need I had to use the mobile phone to find my way to the candles and matches.
I also need to decide whether to overhaul the central heating in this house (there's one or two well-rusted valves and stop-cocks), or move. I can't simply do nothing - the financial implications when things go wrong are worse than the financial implications of preventative maintenance. The only problem is that the last quote I got for overhauling the central heating was in the region of £6,000 :-( Mind you, the cost of moving is far greater than that, so I guess I just have to accept it.
Another curious thing. I did a quick search on yell for plumbers, but I wasn't really happy about calling them from there. I preferred to get the old-fashioned dead trees directory out and look at the individual adverts - as though somehow I could better judge the kind of service I would get based on the message and layout of the adverts. I think I'd have been happy to use yell.com if they'd had the same badly-reproduced typeset-challenged adverts online. Weird.
Hooray for mobiles. My aging 5210 makes a great torch, as you can take the case off easily to expose the hellishly bright keypad lighting. I gather that mobiles were used by a lot of people involved in the recent train crash (apparently trains don't have emergency lighting, or if they do it didn't work).
It makes me wonder why phones don't have dedicated torch functionality, it shouldn't be that hard or expensive to add..
Posted by: Steve D at November 23, 2004 10:52 AM