Friday 8 November 2013

I Have Hatred In My Heart

Pop quiz, hotshots.  You've been called to fix a tenant's broken stair so that they don't fall down it and injure themselves again.  Do you:

a) Set a time and turn up then?
b) Set a time and turn up hours late?
c) Set a time, decide not to come around at all, and let the tenant or the letting agency know?
d) Set a time, decide not to come around at all, tell absolutely no-one, and when challenged say you're weren't in the area at all today anyway.

If you answered anything but d), congratulations! You're less of a feckless dickchimp than the guy we have to rely on to stop us breaking our legs.  Fancy fixing our stairs?

Update: After some very annoyed phone calls, I was able to impress upon our letting agents that having taken the afternoon off, and with guests around on the following afternoon, coming round the next day was completely unacceptable.  They then arranged to have DC (as we shall now know him) to arrive at five that afternoon.

At seven that evening, he arrived to announce he couldn't do anything anyway, since he didn't have his tools with him (what self-respecting handyman would, after all?), and could he come round tomorrow.

Which is when things got strange.

Handyman: Can I come tomorrow?
Squid: Only if it's mid-morning; we have guests coming in the afternoon.
H: How early should I come? 

S: Shall we say ten?
H: Not sure. How early do you get up?S

: We can be up by nine, no problem.
H: Let us say eleven, then. 

S: ...

Update 2: Ah, 'tis fixed now.  Just so long as your definition of "fixed" isn't so rigid as to insist a stair be parallel with the floor, of course. That much, sir, would simply be too far.

3 comments:

Dan Edmunds said...

What's wrong with your stair?

SpaceSquid said...

It's come away from the wall, and sags in the middle whenever you step on it. It might not be so much of a problem if we could just not step on it, but it's where our stairs turn at a right angle, which makes it tough to avoid.

SpaceSquid said...

It's a sad reflection of today's tough economic climate that the Nigerian princes who once offered millions in exchange for money in advance are now Nigerian lurkers offering encouragement in exchange for hits.

How the fake-mighty have fallen...