Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Today I am at home.

Finally Trevor, the maintenance man and his assistant are here to do some of the work we have been pressing the landlord about for months. There is much cursing and banging emanating from the bathroom where the non-refilling cistern and oddly truculent hot tap are getting told what for. I am hopeful that the sink in the bedroom can be fixed too, but although the u-bend has been taken off and a long metal snaky thing shoved down the pipe, their informed opinion is to pour some chemicals down the pipe. We tried that with acid unblocker several times to no obvious effect. Trevor and bloke pooh-poohed that stuff and reckoned that they know of something so effective (presumably they mean corrosive) that it would make an Alien Queen blanch.

I have not mentioned the issue of the door to the flat yet; or rather I have not mentioned it to Trevor. I spoke to the assistant while his boss was parking up the van and he reckons that they will be getting another company in to quote for that job. May be - hopefully - we will have a secure door sometime before the lease expires. Either way, there is some progress at long last, so let's look on the bright side, eh?

I have been out to B&Q and bought a new shower hose for the Athenaeum Club.

The shower is fixed and no longer sprays water everywhere but on the person showering. Hurrah.

I also obtained a set of alum keys to replace those which went walkabout (they will now turn up again) and fixed my wonky armchair.

I am now going to lounge in front of the telly and keep track of the footie for the remainder of the afternoon.

Having begun badly today has begun to offer up new and interesting ways of demonstrating the whimsy of the universe. Or perhaps more accurately, opportunities to demonstrate the low-level of brain activity to be found in the average maintenance troll.

An hour ago, as is my wont, I wandered down to the smoking room for a restorative ciggy, and attempt to finish off the difficult-rated sudoku¹ in The Times². Getting to the smoking room door, I find that the lock is broken, a chair is jammed against the inside of the door handle in the anteroom, and the movement-sensitive lights are off. The room is dark. (The room is right down on the ground floor, and faces north. There was just a tiny amount of natural light visible through the window in the second door from the anteroom into the smoking room itself, no sign of artificial light at all). Anyone in the room is therefore keeping particularly still. No amount of hammering at the door elicited any response from inside.

How would you interpret this?

Honestly?

Well the few of us out in the corridor interpreted it as someone potentially trying to do themselves harm in a comparatively quiet part of the building. Worse, it could be some nutter up to something nastier – this is a government building in central London, after all. So we called security down to investigate.

While security were in the process of reducing the door to matchwood, a baffled workman emerged from inside asking what the racket was all about. He had his i-Pod earphones on, and had only just noticed that something was happening.

This mental giant had gone into the smoking room to maintain the air filters, and had turned all the electrics in the room off. Hence no lights. He was lying under one of the filters, using a torch to illuminate the wiring he was checking, hence no obvious movement for the light sensors even had they been on. Earphones meant no reaction to the increasingly frantic hammering on the door, hence no response.

The chair holding the door shut? The lock was broken and he didn’t want anyone disturbing him while he was working since a lot of ceiling panelling needed to be removed.

Fair enough.

But as security pointed out, next time a Building Services Maintenance: Do Not Enter sign on the door will have the same effect, and no one will think that there’s a murder-suicide pact in progress.

He didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Now we need a new door for the smoking room.



¹Or crazy number puzzle as it is known in Japan.
²Yes, there is an element of hypocrisy here after my previous diatribe against the damned things, but they are addictive.