Warhead (I suck at the internet)

Dear diary, WHAT a week I've had ....

...... the decorator was here, bright and early at about 7:45 on Monday morning and set about stripping the wall and ceiling paper. This took longer than expected, but at least the ceiling plaster didn't come off with the paper, which I was worried might happen. Then he repapered the ceiling and undercoated the woodwork. That was the end of work on day 1. I bummed around on the net in the morning, mostly looking randomly around pics on flickr.com and adding amusing comments to other peoples' work. In the afternoon I decided I'd better try to get my annual report finished so I started trying to make sense of all the stuff my boss and I had drafted. Some of this was done ages ago and things have changed since then, so I had to make quite a lot of changes.

On day 2 the decorator emulsioned the ceiling and glossed the woodwork. That only took until a little while after lunch, after which he called it a day, as he couldn't paper the walls while the woodwork was still wet. I spent my day in much the same way as the day before, i.e. pratting around in the morning and finishing off my report in the afternoon. I decided I'd done enough on mine, so started work on Steve's (my system admin and the sole member of the IT Team who works for me). As before, a lot of it had been drafted months ago, so it was just a case of trying to bring it up to date and trying not to make it identical to last year's report.

Day 3. The decorator papered the walls, I paid him, and off he went. I did more work on Steve's report in the morning and decided I'd done enough. The gas man arrived to service our boiler. As usual, he told me that it's over 20 years old and it can be difficult to get parts for it. He decided the burner was not burning cleanly and ordered a replacement, which would be fitted by another engineer on Thursday. (So much for difficulty obtaining parts.) I knew he was angling to get me to buy a new boiler, but at around £2,000 I'm reluctant to think about it, particularly as the old one is still working and I have other , more pressing things I need to spend my money on.

I went to look how the decorated room is looking .... and noticed that I can see patches of blue showing through the paper on the chimney breast wall. He should really have put lining paper up first. Oh dear.

I picked up my wife from work and told her about the problem with the paper. When she had a look at it she agreed that it wasn't acceptable and rang the decorator. His wife took the call and said he'd call us back. I remarked to my wife that at least he hadn't put any of the paper upside down, which happened to us once before ... and then she noticed that he HAD put about 4 strips upside down. Crap!

He rang back a few minutes later and she explained the problem. he was very apologetic and said he'd be back within half an hour, and sure enough, he was. He'd also bought a couple of extra rolls of paper, just in case.

He thought the blue would not show through once the paste had dried properly, but agreed to repaper it if it did. But he agreed to repaper the bits that were upside down there and then.

Today the carpet was delivered and fitted. No problem there. This afternoon the second gas man arrived to fit the new burner, but proceeded to strip almost the whole boiler down and clean it, which was what the other guy was supposed to do yesterday. While doing this he also tried to persuade me that I should get a 'free, no obligation quote' for a newer boiler. I'd been thinking about this since yesterday and decided it wouldn't be a bad idea, as this one is a bit of an eye-sore and I know it's not fuel efficient by today's standards, but I thought I'd make him work for it. He was a bit of a weird character anyway and I don't think he'd really got the hang of his customer relations banter. He tried to talk to me about football, but I have almost no interest in it, so that flummoxed him a bit. As I was wearing my Procol Harum T-shirt he decided to try the music angle, but he didn't really know anyone I liked and made a faux-pas when he asked if I liked punk. Yeah, I really LOOK like I like punk, don't I? In between all this he kept telling me that my emissions were border-line but managed to adjust things so that at least the boiler needn't be condemned right now. I think he was just trying it on.

I finally put him out of his misery by agreeing to get a quote for a new boiler and he rang and booked an appointment for me for a couple of weeks hence. I shall do my homework in ancticipation of this so I can ask lots of pertinent questions on the day.

Once I'd got rid of him I started putting stuff back in the living room, and got as far as my speaker brackets and routing the cable around the picture rail before it was time to collect my wife from work.

Tomorrow we'll move all the rest of the stuff back in. And I was supposed to be on holiday this week

posted by Warhead @ 1:40 am