Those of you on FB will know I've been having a bad day!
Ian left for the US for 3 weeks on Saturday evening and after just Day 3 I'm having a bit of a meltdown...it's not serious...I'm still laughing, but I'm just a tad frustrated and I now need to get the events of the last few minutes off my chest!
In a nutshell Ellie is being a little mare.
We have no hot water and no water pressure which makes having a shower or a bath a problem unless you've got 2 hours to spare. (By the way, not as much as the problem we had two weeks ago when raw sewage water started pouring from our taps and into our toilets and we had to shut off the mains supply, then empty and acid clean the tanks TWICE.)
The power to JUST our house went off at 2pm this afternoon and the generator has been whirring away all afternoon guzzling the diesel and I'm wondering if it's going to last the night, which I'm told it is...but hey, I've heard THAT ONE before!
At 9pm I'm thinking that all this isn't quite right so I call Kumar. A plumber is coming tomorrow and he will sort out the water and pressure. But do you know what? This plumber must come to our house EVERY week to 'fix' a raft of similar problems on a rotation basis and I'm beginning to smell a rat. The 'Government Electricity company' who WERE coming tomorrow are now coming this evening ,and, please give them a tip for coming. Woo hoo! If they can fix the problem I won't have a sleepless night worrying about the freezer etc and of course I'll give them a tip.
At 9.15pm THREE 'Government Electricity' men arrive, I show ONE of them the cupboards that they need to look into. The second of them watches and the third stands outside and talks into his mobile phone and hey presto! In just 2 minutes normal power is restored and the generator goes quiet. I take it that the guy on the phone must be 'the supervisor' and as advised I hand over a more than generous tip. He looks at it, counts it, looks me sraight in the eye with utter contempt and declares that he's not satisfied. Well, blow me down! Right there and then I felt I should run back into the house and empty the contents of my purse and give it to him but instead I hesitated a few moments (feeling very clammy in 32 degrees with the mosquitos biting) and then I laughed at him. OK, I thought, so I may be here Home Alone but no sweaty Government electricity worker is going to get the better of me just because he can flick a switch. "You have a good job...a salary and a more than generous tip just for 2 minutes work" I told him. Our head guard on night shift at this point is beginning to get concerned I think because he calls Kumar on the phone, who in turn talks to the supervisor and then the three walk off grumbling into the night.
Part of me is grateful to Kumar and the Guard for their intervention, but part of me just wanted to be left alone to stand up to these chauvanistic officious men and tell them to GET LOST (read any expletive you like there but I thought I'd keep it clean!)
...breath AND relax!
2 comments:
Oh I'm so sorry.....when EB comes out to us, I give them some money (usually not over 200 Rs), but Shawn completely lost his temper with them one time - refused to give them anything, had our foster daughter go out and translate to them his tantrum (swear words and all! :( ), and the next time they came, they were so frightened of him they wouldn't come inside the gate! Too funny, unless YOU are the one who is in the house enduring the rising temperatures! So we have a schism in our family....the EB guys know to come when sir is not home, so that they get their tip, because Madame likes her AC. :)
Sure hope your week gets better!
EB? Is that who they are then?!! As advised I gave them 150Rs, which when you think that they probably earn less than 200 a day, all three of them got a 1/4 of their daily wage...seems fair to me. This Madame likes her AC too, especially at the moment!
The week did get better thanks!
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