Stupidly, I left a pile of money on the fridge while I was in Italy and told the cleaner to come as usual.
I thought it would be nice for her not to lose the business. But my cleaner is not some fly-by-night who takes money for nothing. My cleaner is serious about cleaning. She often leaves me cross little notes complaining about how ‘not dirty’ my house is. Being obsessive compulsive myself, it’s a constant battle to stop her resigning. Usually I dirty the house up for her before she comes. She is rarely satisfied unless there is a trail of destruction throughout, which takes some organising. Unfortunately, I was in a rush before I went away and I didn’t have time to untidy. When I got back from Italy, she had gone berserk.
She had cleaned and cleaned and cleaned on top of the cleaning until she couldn’t find anything else to clean and then she had started cleaning things that were never meant to be cleaned in the first place. My house looked completely alien to me. I kept finding strange-looking objects which had once been functional and were now polished museum pieces, cleaned beyond all use.
For example, the coffee grinder used to have a chrome-coated lid which you pushed down as you ground the beans up. She had scrubbed and scrubbed this until the chrome had come off. I guess this means the chrome was fake chrome, but I would never have known that if she hadn’t scrubbed it off. She had also somehow shrunk the lid then jammed it on permanently so it wouldn’t budge. The coffee grinder looked lovely, but was sadly incapable of grinding coffee.
Almost every other small- to medium-sized gadget in the house had joined The Disappeared. Toothbrush chargers, TV remote controls, cheese-graters, all had been banished to a place that may or may not be revealed at some point should there be an amnesty.
But the worst thing of all was what happened to the boiler. Needless to say, I am paranoid about the boiler. I am prepared for almost anything to break, but not the boiler.
When I left for Italy the timer had been playing up but it was basically functional. Now it was as dead as a dodo. It was all too obvious what had happened. In a desperate bid to get the heating and hot water on to constant so she could scrub everything with buckets of hot bleach, she had flicked every switch in sight with disastrous results.
There was now no heating and no hot water no matter what you pressed. Thankfully, I have every form of expensive insurance possible for my boiler. My boiler gets better maintenance, care and medical attention than I do. If I had to choose between my Bupa or my British Gas policy I think I would go with British Gas every time. They came out the same day. Duane, for ’twas his name, his shirt said so, took the front off and immediately identified the problem. A switch was broken ‘through wear and tear’. I bet it was.
He went away to get the part and was back the next day. After it was all put right, I asked him the question you always ask the specialist while you’ve got him in front of you. ‘Is there anything else you can see that might cause problems in future? Is there anything more I could be doing to keep things healthy?’
Duane sucked air through his teeth. ‘Yeah,’ he said sighing, ‘you really could do with a new limescale remover. This one’s rubbish.’ Then he revealed, quite casually, that if my boiler did succumb to limescale problems I would not be covered if I did not have the latest British Gas approved lime-scale remover. What?! I needed no persuading. He had such a thing in the back of the van, which he fitted at a cost of £155. It was called a Hydroflow. It worked by sending pulses through the pipes. He could have told me it worked by sending positive thoughts to the expansion tank telepathically, I would still have bought it.
‘Is that everything I need?’ I asked. Duane um-ed and ah-ed. He explained that if my radiators went wrong I was also not covered if I didn’t have something called a Spirotrap Magnabooster. Was he making this up as he went along? No, he got one out of the van. It was a huge brass thing about a quarter of the size of the boiler itself. This was a good deal more expensive but if I bought the two together I could get them for £300. ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said. Maybe I’ll treat myself to a Magnaboost for Christmas.
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