Dodgy Piping

Dear O'H dear, Lovely Tea Jenny and The Eldest Mini Princess,

Stevo, the heating engineer came back yesterday to flush a radiator as it doesn’t (and never has) heat up properly.

Stevo is the quintessential dour Scotsman.

Me: “How are you doing?”

Stevo: “Ugh”.

Me: “That good?”

Stevo: “It’s been a few days.”

Me: “Oh”

Stevo: “Every job has just been a nightmare. All day yesterday and the job before this.”

Fast forward 2 hours and many iterations of “You couldnae make this up”, (including a muffled one from under the floorboards with some additional adjectives) and poor Stevo looked broken. “I’m going for a fag if that’s ok?”

Poor guy sat on the garden wall shaking his head. He’s well over 6’ and because the space is really tight under the floorboards, he’d had to lie in his back to look at the pipe work and looked a bit like Stig of the Dump, absolutely COVERED in dirt.

He’d found the issue (the radiator had never been piped properly) and came back to fix it today.

He was still dour but he loves dogs and was delighted to see Murphy, who was in doggy day care yesterday (“didnae want to ask where he was, in case…”).

“I keep getting pulled up for getting too involved in jobs” he told me, “I don’t want to say I go over and above..”

But he really does. I felt bad for the him. In 10 years of mentioning this dodgy radiator, he is the only one who’s really bothered to look at why it didn’t work (and fix it) and he got grief for not sticking to his schedule.

He gave us his number and said to call him first if there are still issues. I joked that he had probably already blocked our number and I have to say, his laughing protest was somewhat unconvincing!

C