Yesterday The Other was sitting at her desk when Maude started a low growl. Usually this is just a warning that someone is in the court delivering junk mail – it’s louder when one a them thar pesky power salespeople come to the door.
But The Other looked out the window, saw nothing, and was just telling Maude to be quiet because there was nothing happening when there was a very, very loud BANG.
The Other went out the front to see if something had happened in the carport. No.
Came back inside and thought she heard the washing machine emptying, which would be strange because I had washed [self and clothes] the previous day.
We don’t live in Gippsland but a flood was happening, so The Other called out to me then ran out the front to turn off the mains, while I came downstairs wondering if she had hurt herself.
The BANG came from one of these snake-like, flexible hoses which delivers hot water to the bathroom. The internal rubber hose had finally karked it, the pressure causing the metal casing to blow apart.
Now, following a post on Andrew ’s blog some time ago, showing off his nice new towels and his disgustingly tidy linen press – and because Aunty was moving in and needed to know what’s what about what – I had actually done some tidying. All of the old, dog bath, floor mopping and other miscellaneous towels were at exactly the right height in the press for The Other to grab. [This may seem incidental to you but not to me because The Other would not have hesitated to use new towels had they been at the wrong height.]
With a wad of these she did what Kanute could not, and stemmed the tide. [Well, his name is spelt Cnut in Waikikipedia, but it does not look pretty at first glance so I spelled it with a KA, ok?]
After several attempts to find a plumber by phone… “What do you mean what’s my email address, I’m not sending an email to ask for a plumber [Phone slams]”… she found one who wasn’t “on his way back from Ballarat”, but could arrive within the hour. It took longer for her to organise a plumber than it took me to mop up/wash the bathroom/laundry floors, which is saying something because there was an awful lot of water oozing through a wad of towels into the loungeroom.
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Now, the hose itself was only 23 years old [talk about built-in obsolescence], but we gotta wonder how much one little bit of pipe is worth. “Do you have discounts for old-age pensioners?” asked the other, proudly whipping out her new card. “I’ll tell them at the office not to add GST”, said the plumber. As it is illegal to quote a price without GST included, it seemed the guy was not only an efficient plumber able to replace a pipe in 2.5 minutes, he was also an expert in the art of bovine faeces.
When I asked if I could “work it off” he laughed hysterically and whipped out an EFTPOS machine. The sod.
