There are days where things in my life go horribly wrong. Normally, whenever I interact with other people. Rarely, do I have a bad day that is self-inflicted. But, maybe, here is such a day…?
Since my kitchen installation a few years back, I have never been able to operate the extractor fan. I’ve thought it strange.
There would be little point in me pulling it apart to ascertain and fix the problem. Electrics are not in my skill set, although I can wire a plug, change a fuse and screw in a lightbulb. The holy trinity of almost redundant electrical skills.
When the cavity wall insulator guy came out the other week – minus his daughter, The Assassin – I mentioned my extractor fan problem and he said he’d send a guy out to solve the problem.
So far, so normal.
So, the Extractor Fan Guy (The EFG) comes over to my flat. I explain to him that whenever I switch on the blue wall switch beneath the extractor fan, nothing happens. The fan doesn’t whirr, it doesn’t even stutter into life. It is a dead fan.
He strokes his chin and says “Ooh” in the manner of every car mechanic. He looks at the fan. He looks at the switch. He presses the blue switch up and then down again and nothing happens. I have passed the lie detector test.
“That’s strange,” he says, rubbing his chin again and making me wonder if he had a particularly bad shave that morning?
He switches it on and off again before deciding he’ll take a look at the actual fan. He unscrews the outer casing and has a look inside for what, I don’t know. He seems keen to remove some stray wires with his pliers. It unsurprisingly has no effect. He tries the blue switch again. Nothing.
He starts to look around the kitchen at various switches and there, hidden behind my paper shredder, on a wall on the other side of the kitchen and around 12ft away from the fan is a red switch. Above it is the word “fan.”
“Ah, this could be it,” he says. “I’ll try this.” To be honest, it was probably the best plan to be had.
He presses it down and the fan whizzes into life. I feel like a klutz.
He reassembles the fan.
I apologise profusely to him for calling him out for such a stupid thing that I could have solved myself, had I not stupidly thought that the switch for the fan was the blue switch underneath the actual fan and not the switch clearly signposted “fan” on an adjacent wall.
“Oh, dont worry,” he says. “This thing happens a lot.”
Clearly, it didn’t happen a lot. If it happened a lot, he would have gone straight to the red switch and not faffed around with the blue one and dismantled the fan.
I’m pretty confident this was the first time this had happened, ever. I am a bad person.
He switches off the useless blue switch that clearly doesn’t do anything and is there for decorative purposes only and leaves the flat.
I am pleased that I now have a working fan and can now enjoy making home-made curries without the smell lingering around my kitchen before wafting its way downstairs into the neighbours flat below me.
Thankfully, not once has he invited himself up for dinner… Or complained.
A couple of hour later, I went to the toilet. I went to flush. Nothing happened. I went to wash my hands in the bathroom sink. Nothing happened. I tried every tap in the flat. Nothing happened.
I looked at the boiler and nothing happened because I didn’t understand how a boiler actually works.
It had been quite the morning. I decided to take myself off out to lunch at Wetherspoons and hope that by the time I returned, the water supply would all be sorted out by the water company because obviously, they were doing some maintenance somewhere?
I return home. There is still no water.
I call the water board. I’m told that there is no maintenance work going on in my area and they decide to send a guy out to me. He arrives within the hour.
I explain that I have no water. He goes outside and lifts the appropriate drain cover and gets on his hands and knees on the cold, damp pavement and starts scrabbling about twisting, pulling and pushing at pipes and everything within them. He is there for fifteen minutes.
Eventually, he stands up and knocks on the door of the people under the stairs. They tell him their water supply is fine. He decides my water problem must be internal and not external.
He asks me where my stopcock is? I really wish it didn’t have such a stupid name. I remove all the cleaning stuff from under the kitchen sink and show it to him and turn on the kitchen tap as instructed for demonstration purposes.
Again, he gets on his hands and knees and starts examining the pipework. It’s all okay. He notices the blue switch on the wall that the fan guy switched off because it was of no use whatsoever.
He switches it on.
Water gushes out.
Again, I feel like a klutz.
Again, I apologise profusely to him for calling him out for such a stupid thing that I could have solved myself, had I not stupidly thought that the blue switch underneath the extractor fan was just decorative, useless and of no importance.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he says. “Sometimes these things switch themselves off. It happens a lot.”
Clearly, it didn’t happen a lot. If it happened a lot, he would have knocked on my door and gone straight to the blue switch and switched it on and not faffed around outside on his hands and knees for fifteen minutes on the cold, damp pavement dirtying his hands.
I’m pretty confident this was the first time this had happened, ever. No water switch has ever switched itself off. If it had, it would have been investigated by Derek Acorah. Again, I am a bad person.
Before leaving, he explains that the unlabelled blue switch on the kitchen wall by the fan is actually, a water switch. Seriously, who knew such a thing existed? Definitely, not me. I won’t forget it in a hurry, if at all.
No matter how much I had learnt this day – and it had certainly been educational – I still felt like a klutz. This bad day was definitely of my own making.
Although, in my defence, what idiot puts an unlabelled blue water switch underneath an extractor fan and an extractor fan switch across the kitchen and nowhere near the fan?
No, this was, as usual, definitely someone else’s fault.
Categories:Food, Home, Pubs, Television
Russ Writes 
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