So this has been my week. When would you have snapped?
On Saturday morning my wife told me “we have no hot water”. Ok... Need to call the plumber... So I called the letting agency and they sent in a plumber that morning.
The guy comes, starts looking around, and asks “have you had someone else work on this recently?”. “Yes, it broke a couple of months ago...”. “Right, you need to have the same guys come back because I don’t know what they did!”. And he packed his tools and off he went.
We called the agency and they told us someone else would be coming by at 1pm. “Good”, we thought, “we’ll put the little one to sleep at 12:00 and when they come, he will have had at least a good hour’s sleep!”. At 12:15 the guy rings and in he comes banging on every piece of metal he finds and talking really loudly outside my son’s bedroom despite my repeated requests. As it turns out, the last time someone had done work to it, a wire was left loose and that blew the PCB (I had to google it). “Sorry, I’ll have to shut off the whole thing and order a new PCB. We might have one in stock! I might even be back today with it! Or maybe Monday. If we need to order one, it will be Wednesday at the latest!”. So that was me without hot water or heating.
I didn’t hear from them again that day.
What I did hear was a strange dripping sound that night after 10pm. I went to see what it was and found my hallway flooded from water coming out of a radiator. At 11pm I had someone over again to stop the leaking.
On Monday there was no part, but there was an email from the agency saying one of the engineers had taken offence at my request not to speak loudly in front of my sleeping son’s bedroom. We were told the part would be delivered on Tuesday and someone would come over on Wednesday at the very latest.
In the meantime, with temperatures reaching 5ºC at night, I’m waking up at night to turn on the heater in my son’s bedroom to keep it warm, and I’m boiling pots of water every morning just so we can wash ourselves.
So on Wednesday... “I’m really sorry, the order was dispatched today, it will be delivered tomorrow!”.
This is when I start sending increasingly angry emails.
On Thursday we are told “I really don’t know what’s happening! There must be something with the mail! The part hasn’t arrived yet!”.
Which brings us to Friday. I started calling them in the morning saying I wouldn’t be left another weekend without heating or hot water. “I’m waiting for the contractor to get the part!” the agent says. “I don’t care what you do. This is really starting to become ridiculous!”.
So we’re told that the engineer will come in within the hour and 3 hours later, at 6pm, he arrives with the part. After a while of banging things around he goes up to me and says: “You know what! This part that we just bought, it’s to replace the one that was burnt. But what caused it to be burnt is this other part, see? We need to order one of these. But I’m sure it won’t take long!”.
😐