Use It Up And Wear It Out

I had a refreshing encounter with a plumber dude this morning.

Refreshing because (a) he was amenable to doing some work without the sharp intake of breath which normally accompanies a contractor’s commencement of laborious activity but mostly because (b) he whipped out an iPhone which quite frankly looked like it had been used to detonate a landmine.

The screen was cracked and fissured so much that activating any of the apps must have felt akin to caressing Bernard Cribbins’ whiskery jowls. There were paint spatters. There were oily skid marks. There were questionable potholes that may or may not have been caused by high impacts on the quantum scale. Of course, the allusion to Bernard Cribbins breaks down completely at this point.

It was a well used, possibly well loved, definitely not well looked after device.

And that pleased me.

It pleased me because the thought occurred that too often these days we lavish such love and status onto our electronic gadgetry that the merest hairline scratch on a touchscreen, the merest infinitesimal microdot of grit under a plasticoating and we have to head straight out to the vendor to buy a new one. A brand new one because the old one has now been sullied and besmirched. Part of the joy of having it and showing it off is showing it off in prime brand spanking new condition. The tiniest chip will render it second-rate and give it the appearance of being second-hand and, worse still, make it appear as if the device is nose-diving already off the cliff of contemporality and pitching itself useless-face first into the pit of obsolescence.

It was plain that what mattered to the plumber chappy was not the appearance of the device and, therefore not the status the device could confer onto him... but that the device still worked. It was functional. The touchscreen still worked. He could make still calls. Access his apps. Troll on Twitter. Download dodgy films from the internet.

In his own small way he was doing his bit for the environment (if not for the economy). He was, if not mending and making do, then at the very least just making do.

And this to me seems a good way to go. How many of us as we pass through life cast sneering glances and sneerier comments towards battered vehicles we see out and about on the roads? Battered computers being used? Battered bags carried around? Battered clothes being worn?

If they still work and are fit for purpose we should use them. They’ve gobbled up God knows how many of Earth’s resources just by being made. Let’s get our money’s worth before we buy yet more gadgetry and add to the resource debt that is currently mounting up against us.

Let’s use things up and wear them out. It is the highest honour we can afford anything that we create. To use a tool until it cannot be used anymore.

To this end then, despite the holes in the back of my underpants I am going to continue to wash and wear them. The front bit is fine. The hammock effect is uncompromised. I’m going to maintain their functional status for the long haul.

We shall go on together until the end. Or at least until my dangly bits go into freefall.

And I defy any of you to tell me I’m wrong.

Coldmac

There can be no more debilitating combination of words in the English language than “third party subcontractor”.

Its dictionary definition must surely read: “pronoun, common insult, ‘yee-har, move ‘em up, ride ‘em out, raw hide’, about as much use as football boots on a jellyfish”.

To my mind – and I am probably being wildly unfair – despite all the shenanigans with work permits and legal contracts that undoubtedly bind the sub contractor to the contracting agent they are still one step down from tinkers and gypo’s... and only slightly better than those gangs of swarthy, neckerchiefed ruffians who tarmac your drive without your permission and then forcibly present you with an invoice that has been date stamped by the knuckledusters of their accounts clerk who also happens to moonlight as an all-in wrestler down by the docks on a Friday night to earn enough money for his mother’s sex change operation.

When I know work is being carried out by a third party subcontractor I know in my heart of hearts that the work would be more effectively carried out by a team of onanistic chimpanzees.

Clearly the top level contractor tends to agree with me as that is who invariably turns up to perform the work.

The pavements along our street were resurfaced last week. Coldmacked. Some sort of cheapo tarmacadam is thinly applied to the pavement like swirling a teaspoon of soup around the interior of a bain-marie – the object being to acquire a thin but even coating all round that dries in the fraction of the time.

Notice for this kind of work – especially when it stands between you and your own front door – is usually given with enough consideration that you can make alternative arrangements; i.e. either arriving home earlier or later or bunking up with a friend.

Our goodly subcontractor last week gave my street a mean hour’s notice. Most of us – my wife and I included – were at work. The first my wife knew of the resurfacing was when she drove over it to reach our front drive. Meanwhile, when I arrived home two hours later I had to perform the long-jump to get from the grass verge to my own hallowed garden path. The result is that we have two dynamic tyre marks making it look as if my wife constantly skids the car into the front garden and my back heel is forever immortalized to be one day dug up and cooed over by a futuristic Tony Robinson.

The stuff – the “cold mac” – was meant to take a measly hour to dry. Imagine our surprise then when we exited the family domicile the next morning and found the car left further tyre marks in the still soft tarmac when we pulled out of the drive.

The letter of advice slung through our door at the eleventh hour warned us not to step onto the tarmac for an hour after it had been applied lest we disfigure the appearance of the pavement and get tarmac onto our carpets which, the letter writer was at pains to add, would be very difficult to remove.

Plainly we were meant to camp out in the street all night with the kids until sometime the next day. Maybe even stay in a hotel. Or just construct a trebuchet with which we could have launched the kids into their beds through the closed bedroom window.

Cowboys.

Cowboys employed by idiots contracted by pen pushing accounts clerks who spent the 57 pence they saved buying a novelty Tippex-mouse.

I can smell the lucky heather from here.

Can’t you?

Major Infarction And General Anaesthetic

So my poorly hot water heater was given its pre-op clean Tuesday evening. The dust was scrubbed off. The old bottles of Domestos and Oilatum were removed from the top. The blood spatter patterns were removed from the sides (don’t ask). All in preparation for Dr Plumb to delve into its coppery innards Wednesday morning.

I told work I’d be in late. I needed to be on hand to wipe my water heater’s brow and whisper reassurances into its metallic ears as the engineer invaded it’s inner sanctum with a screwdriver and a rolled up copy of The Sun.

As it was the operation was cancelled. After an hour of fruitless waiting I rang Sureway to be told by the receptionist that Dr Plumb’s previous patient was currently dying on an operating table somewhere in Suburbville and would take a lot longer to resuscitate. I couldn’t afford to lose yet more time at work so had to reschedule the op for the next day. Thursday at 4pm.

Typical bloody NHS.

As it was the Dr Fixit who attended on Thursday was worth the wait. If we were fearing a greasy-handed butcher who would leave foreign objects afloat in my water heater’s tender abdomen (I believe it’s called retention) I was wrong. We had a lovely young doctor who prepped and cleaned the operating table beforehand and even swept up the rusty entrails afterwards too. It was like the NHS had been unable to attend and had sent BUPA instead.

He quickly ascertained the possible sources of the problem: either a faulty valve (replacement would be £170 – may as well get a new water heater if this was the case) or a worn diaphragm.

It proved to be the latter. Much cheaper to replace and very reassuring to know that my water heater has been indulging in safe sex for all these years without me knowing about it. Though it does explain why our shower unit always looks so perky in the mornings.

We now have the pitter-patter of hot water running throughout the house once more. Father and water heater are both doing well.

Thank you all for your get well cards, your flowers and your chocolates. They were much appreciated though very much more imagined.

I can now get myself up to my neck in hot water once again (in fact I must remember to tell this to my wife: she’ll be thrilled).

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream

So I’m back at work.

I’m back up to my neck in petty bureaucracy, ropey plumbing and orang-utan arsed contractors.

The familiar smell of my workstation – Tipp-ex, chocolate, wood polish and cyanide (I will find a use for those capsules one day, I promise you) is not acting as a balm. One expects a little residual sourness when one returns to work after a holiday but the rising torrent of acid that is currently bubbling away in my gorge (oo-er) is alarming to say the least.

How am I keeping myself sane? You may very well ask.

Current favourite coping strategy is to indulge in a spot of dark fantasizing.

No. Not of that sort, you mucky minded lot...

I am not really a building supervisor for a local government authority.

I am a sleeper agent.

I am here to dismantle the system, the authoritarian regime that maintains law & order and regulates the price of DVDs in this capitalist nanny state. You see me sitting here, searching Google Maps for the nearest Jewson’s outlet, never realising that I am in fact subtlely interrogating Google Earth for the wherewithal to gain access to this country’s great edifices of power.

But I am not sure, at this point in time, what exactly those edifices are.

I thought it might be 10 Downing Street but mentally I have this confused with Billy Smart’s circus. My ‘controller’ is pushing me to apprehend the nerds that run Twitter but I suspect they might be a little out of my jurisdiction. Besides which, I use Twitter to further my own socialist manifesto so suspect my ‘controller’ might be a double agent. Or at the very least Ryan Giggs. Either way, not to be trusted.

However, the perks are pretty good. I have excellent ball control.

Unlike Ryan.

I am of course building a dirty bomb beneath my desk. My work colleagues no doubt think I am up to something seedy and unpalatable with a sheet of bubble wrap and an old copy of Hello magazine but really I am constructing a weapon of such awesome destructive power that Harold Camping has snapped his Casio pocket calculator clean in half and is currently sobbing into his Gideon’s Bible. Once I’ve inserted the last paperclip you’re all for it.

I am looking around the office. Taking careful note of the photocopier, the stationery cupboard, the water cooler. Noting their location.

‘Cos tomorrow they won’t be here. Instead their atomized remains will be spread across a 10 mile wide crater, at the centre of which will be the smoking remains of my desk and my sock suspenders.

I may bequeath my hole-punch to someone before it is too late.

Oh what the hell. It’s too good for any of them anyway.

Now, where was I?

Oh yes.

There’s dog poo outside the building.

By ‘eck, I needs must get me shovel.

It’s so nice to be back at work.

Small Unremembered Acts Of Unkindness

I’m sure it’s not deliberate but this has happened with galling regularity during my time “here” as corporate slave. And it makes me hit boiling point every time because, in all honesty, I’m never quite sure how to handle it.

An engineer turns up in a company car. Or his own car. Whatever. The car is not important. But he needs to get parked and doesn’t want to use the Pay & Display spaces in town. This is fine. I lower the bollards and allow him to drive into the fiercely guarded enclave of the building’s footprint. I direct him to the staff parking bays down the back of the building. Off he drives with a cheery wave.

Pleasure, mate. I’m here to be helpful.

And then I wait by the entrance doors so I can chaperone the poor bewildered engineer to wherever he needs to be in the building. Usually a urinal which is behaving like the gateway to Hell.

And I wait.

And I wait.

And he stays in his bloody car. He doesn’t move. He just sits there in the warm, sealed cockpit of his worksmobile.

And I stand there by the front doors feeling like a jilted groom.

What do I do? ‘Cos I’m getting narked. I’m getting annoyed. I’m stood there like the proverbial last sausage and he’s rubbing himself off against his walnut dash.

Logic and the laws of dynamic motivation (is there even such a thing) dictate that I go up to the car and knock officiously on the windscreen and ask very loudly if he’s going to be joining me anytime soon because the vicar is getting impatient and the reception is booked.

But I worry that this might precipitate a faux pas of monumental proportions.

You see, he could be delayed for a very legitimate reason...

He’s taking an emergency phone call from his wife: “Darling, little Terry has found your stash of crystal meth and he’s bouncing off the walls with grandpappy’s pump-action assault rifle – the nanny is pulling her hair out and the nursery looks like a bomb site! What shall I do? What shall I do?”

Or – and this is the scenario that I fear the most – I storm up to the car, violently yank open the driver’s door and have a paraplegic engineer fall out onto the pavement like a newborn lamb from its mother’s womb.

Oh God. I am so sorry. Do you need a hand? Oh shit. I didn’t mean that the way it came out, honestly.

You get the idea.

So I wait.

And I wait.

And eventually the engineer shuffles out of his vehicle – not panicked in any way, with a full complement of limbs, wiping the foam of a take-out cappuccino from his top lip.

Utter. Git.

Do I Need To Get A Life?

So I was walking home the other day and I walk past three yellow tabarded workmen who have plainly spent the morning worrying at a huge hole in the road in between supping copious cups of tea and admiring a picture of Cheryl Cole’s champion cleavage in The Star and I notice that something is amiss.

(And no it wasn’t that Cheryl has forgotten to shave her chest.)

The workmen, their tabards and indeed their very large, shiny new, lime green flatbed truck are all totally unidentifiable.

There are no monikers, no motifs, no company name. No telephone number, no web address, no “I wish my wife was as dirty as this van” graffiti.

They are to a man, personae non gratae. Men with no names. They do not exist and so, legally, how can anyone make them accountable for this big Bernard Cribbins-esque hole that they’ve just opened up in the tarmac?

They could be anybody. They may not even be kosher workmen. They could be... er... tarmac thieves. They could be terrorists about to plant a dirty bomb in the even dirtier sewer pipes of Leamington Spa. They could spit on my shoes, shit on the pavement and make lewd comments to the Cheryl Cole look-a-likes walking by and who the hell would we complain to?

‘Cos once they drive off they are gone forever. Untraceable.

I know what you are thinking. Why, Steve, are you wasting your not inconsiderable intellect worrying about workmen who don’t have a company name on their van when you could be pouring your magnificent energies into your new novel or exposing the many shortcomings of The Big Society bollocks that the Coalition Government are currently spouting and – look – you’ve even missed an opportunity to publish a suitably salacious picture of Cheryl Cole at the top of this post.

Well, the reason is: I don’t like Cheryl Cole.

And regarding the workmen, let me recount to you a story that was once told to me by an old workman a couple of years ago who took a sighing break from his cup of tea and Page 3 dolly-bird to wise me up. There was once this derelict house, see. It had been falling down for years. One day a team of workmen turned up with vans, diggers and demolition equipment – a whole team of them. None of the vans had names on and likewise the uniforms of the workmen. But hey, they had to be kosher because it was broad daylight, there was so many of them and they had, like, real JCB’s and everything.

Over the ensuing weeks they demolished the house. All of it. Every brick, tile and breeze block. They then took it all away. Every brick, tile and breeze block and left a big gap in the line of building’s in that street.

Some weeks later a man from the council turned up to survey this renovation-worthy council property and wondered where the hell it had disappeared to.

Oh, thought the neighbours. We now realize what has happened. It’s been stolen.

Cue dramatic music followed by a humungous Homer Simpson doh!

Still think I need to get a life?

Harrumph! Well when people start nicking the roads or the houses near you... don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Could Dave Be The One?

The search has been long.

There have been times when I have given up hope, when my heart has cried out, “just let this foolish hope go, learn to live without it – why put yourself through the pain of rejection time and time again?”

But the call, that human call of one to another, of flesh to flesh, is strong and unquenchable. So you lick your wounds. You dust yourself down. You gird your loins and throw yourself back into the market place.

When I first started looking I had a few promising bites, a few responses that I confess I built up too high. Far too quickly I pinned my entire future happiness on them. Invested far too much emotional energy.

To a man they all let me down. They didn’t return my calls. They didn’t answer the phone. Some, the worst of them, faked interest, even went so far as to make plans with me, describing how they thought the liaison would go... and then left me hanging. They disappeared. Took off with someone else. Allowed themselves to be bought by a higher bidder.

I confess I briefly considered a session of DIY. There’s no shame in it. We’ve all done it at some point I’m sure. But – let’s be truthful here – it’s just not as good as when someone else does it for you. When you have the right person on hand to manipulate the right parts. Who will fit you in and make sure all the pipe work connects properly.

So I held out for Mr Right. Held myself firm through the long, dark, cold nights of rejection.

And finally it paid off. Finally I found him.

He was advertising in the local paper. Just a small ad but I saw that as a good sign; a sign that he was as hungry for what I had to offer as I was to give it. His name was Dave. An honest name if ever there was one. I rang him and told him my needs, my voice a-tremble and breathy – how many times had I reached this stage in the past only to be ultimately spurned?!

He said he’d call round. I tried to take it with a pinch of salt, to not get my hopes up lest they be dashed again. But no. He arrived. On time. On the day and time that he said he would. A man of his word.

Finally my heart dared to hope.

He listened to my wants, my desires. He didn’t turn away in disgust or contempt. He could do all that I wanted. He priced it all up. The full service. It was just right. Affordable but no so that I’d feel too cheapened by the transaction.

I agreed. We shook hands. The rendezvous has been set for next week.

The relationship is established!

And now my dear, dear reader my heart is now joyous where once it was bereft. My soul sings where once it did cry. The long search is over. A plumber has at last been engaged. My taps and my leaky bath are to be saved!

Hallelujah!

The Amityville Plumber

Dark forces are at work in my house.

The shadows bend outward from the corners as if stretching, reaching for additional purchase to haul themselves further into the mortal world.

Upstairs in an inexplicably empty room flies seem to multiply unnaturally and mither themselves to the point of insanity against a solitary window that is impossible to open. So many of them, swarming, crawling, buzzing like infernal machines, that they block out the light of the sun.

In fact we sent a priest upstairs to sort that room out with a blessing a couple of weeks ago and he still hasn’t come down. Come to think of it I found his dog collar on the stairs a few days after his arrival and it had teeth marks in it.

And don’t talk to me about our basement.

What basement? Yeah, that’s what I mean. We didn’t have one when we first moved into the house but suddenly we do and it seems to have a strange effect on all who venture into it. Their eyes turn red, their teeth become large and pointy and they start talking in a slightly unhinged but manly baritone... something about the gateway to hell.

Now, either my house is built on the site of an old McDonald’s Drive-thru or something truly nefarious is occurring.

It is the only thing I can think of to explain the sheer impossibility of obtaining any damned contractors to come round and perform the multitude of small jobs that are currently hampering my enjoyment of my family home.

I wrote a while ago about my difficulties in obtaining a plumber. I’ve approached others since then and they have all given me the same excuse: yes, I am interested but can’t come round now to look at the job, I will call you on such and such a day and arrange a visit. Right. So such and such a day arrives and they don’t call so I call them back and get the same excuse repeated to me and the same thing happens yet again.

And then there are the TV aerial installers. I tried to engage one of those too. I left several messages on the company phone. Nobody has rung me back. It’s £159 to have a new aerial installed apparently. Not huge money, I know, but it is the price they have put on it themselves. I’m willing to pay it. But for some reason they don’t want to come round to my house to earn it.

And now I have to engage someone to try and repair our cooker because another sausage-based inferno has put paid to the dials on the fascia and the cooling fan has lost the ability to turn itself off.

My heart balks at the mere thought of having to kick off yet another round of polite enquiries only to be given the finger / the hand / the cold shoulder / the thank you but no thank you / the brush off.

Christ. The only person who comes round regularly and without fail to my house is bloody Wayne the window cleaner. You remember him? Wayne the bloody nutcase, commie hating, Christian platitude spouting, crusade revivalist with a grudge against all western world bankers. Every month he comes round to clean my windows because I’m too much of a coward to tell him to take his chamois and his bucket and his ladder and his hordes of demonic flies and sod off.

Ooh.

Demonic flies.

You don’t think he might be, you know, putting some voodoo on my house or something? Some kind of weird window cleaning juju?

*Gulp*

Anybody know a good priest? Shit. Hold on a minute; I’ve already tried that.

Help!

You Plumb!

Do people not want work? With the country selling its kidneys for rent money, do people not want to earn a bit of cash?

We have a small list of plumbing jobs in my house. Nothing too onerous: a couple of taps that don’t work properly, a leaky sink and a leaky shower, a wonky shower head that refuses to stay in position (so one must shower doing the Hitler salute to keep it over one’s head)... all stuff that a good plumber could sort out in an hour or two. A nice little earner in fact.

But do you think I can commission someone to do the work?!

The first thing I did was to pose the question on my work’s intranet: can anybody recommend a good, reasonably priced plumber?

The response to this was good. Three recommendations plopped into my inbox. Three likely lads championed by satisfied customers.

I rang all of them. All bar one answered and set a time to come round the ol’ gaffe last weekend, take a look and give a quote. I left a phone message with the third and left it at that.

The weekend came but the two plumbers didn’t. No show. Bleeding great. The third one, however, picked up his phone message and rang me back. This looked more promising. He attended within the hour, quoted £80 (I bit his hand off) and said he’d formalize the quote on Monday and get in touch to make arrangements to come and do the job.

Monday came and went. Nothing. Nadda.

OK. Maybe he was busy. Had a rush job on. A little old lady with her rheumatoid arthritic toe jammed up her combi tap. These things happen.

A week later though and the plumber drought continues. Not a sign. Not a dickie-bird. And I’m not sure I can be bothered to chase any of these jokers up.

If they don’t want the work I’m not sure I want to give them my money in the first place.

They can all go and shove their heads down the nearest toilet. After all, some might say that is an occupational hazard (when they actually do their jobs, that is).

Water

The foyer in the building where I work has, as its centrepiece, a water feature. A huge brown stone monolith of odd angles and aesthetically engineered drops that guarantee a playful background plash of water whenever a visitor drops in to spend a week’s wages on a cup of tea in the café.

Or at least is does when the bloody thing is working.

Unfortunately it hasn’t worked for about a year. It was turned off last winter due to suspicions of “a small leak”.

I guess this is an occupational hazard for a water feature. That and people lobbing pound coins down the plughole or going for a number 2 down the chute.

For various reasons it wasn’t looked into. It got overlooked. The water feature became a dusty dry stone sculpture that only dreamt of the cool flow of legionella rich water gently caressing its chiselled corners.

Until this week. The idea of restoring water to the “desert” feature suddenly became “of the moment”. It became my task for the week. My pre-Christmas mission.

Experts were called in and assembled. Opinions were voiced. An agreement was reached. Existence of the leak needed to be empirically proven or disproven one way of the other.

So an experiment was launched. The water was switched back on. The algae on the stone was moistened with H20 once more.

Like all water features, ours works by recycling the same water round and round. The continual movement prevents stagnation and bacterial build-up. A simple ball-cock mechanism adds fresh mains water whenever necessary to compensate water lost by evaporation or hoodies taking a rare bath. Yesterday, once the system was up and running, we disabled the ball-cock. With no fresh water topping up the system we’d soon be able to see if we were losing any.

We started at 3pm and my brief was to switch the thing off at 5pm when I went home and then back on again tomorrow morning at 9.

At the most we were expecting maybe an inch of water to disappear.

Instead, at 5pm I was gobsmacked to discover that not only was the water feature dry but the entire reservoir tank was also empty. The pump was gamely sucking up hot air.

Where had all that water gone? Several gallons of it had vanished down into the guts of the building in the space of 2 hours without any evidence of it ever having been there.

We have a mystery on our hands.

Further investigations will take place today. I daresay some dull, prosaic explanation will be found. Personally I’d like to imagine that the water has escaped into another dimension, possibly feeding a waterfall in Narnia or topping up a jacuzzi for a couple of half naked elf maidens.

Or perhaps, like a recent episode of Doctor Who, the water has taken on a sinister life of its own and is, even as I write, seeking out some poor unwitting human host whose body can be possessed and turned to some dastardly scheme of world domination. Indeed, it may explain the congregation of strange gentlemen who daily hang around the front of my work building, foaming at the nose with various sized cans of Special Brew growing out of their bottom lips and who have an undissuadable penchant for defecating up the pilasters.

It’s something in the water, I’m telling you...

Double Acts

Two workmen engaged on a job will get it completed in half the time, right?

Wrong.

I know this for a fact because, in my normal line of duty, I have had copious experience of dealing with both the lone contractor and the contractor who brings his mate along to help.

The lone contractor is your friend. Fact. He’s on his own, he wants to get the job done as quickly as possible and get out of your hair with the minimum of fuss and mess. Which is exactly what you want too. Perfect. I feel an inordinate sense of relief when a lone contractor turns up.

Not so when “the comedy duo” turn up.

You see a workman and a workman’s mate will always see themselves as a comedy double act. A Bit Of Fry And Laurie. Baddiel and Skinner. Morecombe and Wise if they’re both of the older generation. Never French and Saunders for some reason – but maybe that’s a gender thing.

And they will see it as their sole purpose in life to entertain you and whoever is hanging around in the office for the duration of their visit. The job will take twice as long to complete because they will inevitably distract each other. They can’t help it.

The main workman will be the guy actually doing the job while his mate will merely sit nearby, pass the occasional adjustable spanner and be the fall-guy for all the comedy gold that his partner is endlessly spouting.

And they’ll have a pre-prepared script. Little stock phrases that they’ll wheel out for the benefit of those who are in ear-shot. I guarantee that their performance will include some if not all of the following:

“See what I have to put up with?”

“You should see him on a bad day.”

“You can’t get the staff these days.

“It keeps him out of trouble / off the streets.”

“Feel this if you don’t believe me.”

“Swings and roundabouts, mate, swings and roundabouts.”

“His mother dropped him on his head as a baby.”

“I could do it but I can’t guarantee it’ll be a permanent fix.”

“I won’t bore you with all the technical details.”

“You don’t have to be mad to do this job [pause for a single heartbeat] but you do.”

They’ll also employ a fine selection of sharp intakes of breath that range dramatically in length, pitch and sibilance and thus allow you to gauge the cost of the repair accordingly.

Their banter is invariably worse (i.e. more intense and infinitely louder) if women with breasts are in the vicinity. A little cleavage will see their body posture attempt to emulate that of freshly waxed 1970’s muscle men whilst paradoxically deepening the amount of darkly furry bum crack that they have on show. They will also lie about in strangely contorted positions as they attempt to reach the necessary bit of pipe work / electrical conduit and allow their beer guts to roll around on the carpet like separate legless animals made out of tripe. This is naturally a vastly effective mating display and inevitably has the heavily breasted ladies of the office positively drooling into their Tipp-ex. Or possibly gagging. One of the two.

They will also trick you into making them a free cup of tea by employing a gag straight out of On The Buses or some other down-at-heel British comedy film of yore.

“What’s the name of that little thing that you put golf balls on?”

“A tee?”

“Ooh lovely, milk and two sugars in mine, please.”

Doh. How can I possibly defend myself against such forceful rapier like wit?

It strikes me that life must be fine indeed for the workman with a workman’s mate. You swan around all day thinking you’re Ronnie Barker. Curvy office ladies adore you. You get to handle the odd spanner or three and you sup all the free tea you can slosh into your voluminous belly. And you get paid vast amounts of money for taking 2 hours to do a 10 minute job.

Fantastic.

Hmm. I need to get me a beer gut and a comedy partner all of my very own...