IdioC's Fifth Dimension

Having recently resettled into my flat after a medical hiatus from work (which incidentally stopped me posting last week), before I get back to my course, I have found myself with ample time to read, think and otherwise procrastinate. Before I descended into the last episode to throw me off the straight and narrow, I was cursing several little gremlins abiding with me – not contributing to the rent at that, the little bastards – in the place.  The same gremlins are probably familiar to you: The grill’s stuffed and bereft of a supplier of replacement element, so cheese on toast vanishes from the menu; the electric heaters have cables that look like a desperate chinchilla’s last meal, so your various appendages are cold enough to be preserved then exhumed in near-perfect condition by future archaeologists; the bathroom’s not water tight, so using the shower results in water through the light socket in the flat below, causing an electrically-live tsunami; you get the picture.

These are all long-since resolved and – surprisingly perhaps in the eyes of the stereotype – weren’t the fault of the landlord. In fact, the stereotype in most of the cases I’ve known has been completely and utterly shattered. As I’ve sat here in the flat, enjoying the benefits of having most of the things actually working now, I’ve been stuck thinking about how in the past five years, moving around as a student then as a graduate, I’ve lived in five different places with their own unique charms, features and monumental fuck-ups. Here are (perhaps fittingly) five of the main problems I’ve encountered through my own, grated experience.

1. I Always Wanted To Go To The Zoo, Not Live In It

Like most students fed into the Undergraduate shredder directly from A-Levels I plumbed for the option of living in a Student Hall: A facility for new students to be thrown together in close quarters for the fostering of relationships, the spread of diseases and the protection of the city at large. Even picking which hall to go for is a lottery in any University with any sort of history whatsoever – no, I wasn’t Oxbridge, just inherently condescending – as all the old buildings with good rooms have “new blocks” stuck on the side like metal and glass zits with an ensuite and there’s no way to ensure you get one over the other. You could opt for your grand hall and end up with a shoebox, want the option of modern facilities that work for the rare occasions a student feels they’re too unclean or alternatively not mind which you end up in and quickly learn why the others had so strong a preference. So I went into a post-war architecture hall where all of the rooms were the same and felt that at least everyone in the hall was suffering with me. Besides, you don’t want somewhere too alluring to stay into to help drive you to go to the pub, do you?

All of which made the fates conspire to make me regret my choice. I end up on the floor which is the thoroughfare for the half of the hall to argue over the superiority of sports fixtures versus soaps on the TV, to head to the library to do that “work” thing half of us hadn’t experienced in our lives or, using the internet connections, plead for more money from their parents to increase the profitability of alcohol duty. Students gather in the corridors to natter with their mates and end up disturbing someone else doing a vital essay or whack their music up loud enough to be heard in the rooms above, below and adjacent… as well as the ones above and below them… and the next block just because it’s the weekend. Then of course, everyone comes back in dribs and drabs from 10pm up to singing “Can’t take my eyes off of you” drunkenly in a South Wales accent through the corridor at 4 in the morning. The shared bathroom facilities seem institutional and any easily transmissible disease like mumps spreads like wild fire. You get illness before an exam, noise when you work, yet invariably annoy the snot out of someone else when you merely have fun. You went in wanting to love 25 other people and ended up finding a house with the two to four you fell out with the least.

We were zoo animals in carbon-copy cages. Hell, with the cleaning said cages were mucked out, with the catering we were fed out of troughs and occasionally we’d get visitors and scalp them for as much money as we could get. For all I know, some of them might even have started a breeding program.

2. I Don’t Care If They’re Sash Windows, I’m Freezing

I should begin this with the obvious concession: sash windows are a picturesque feature that shows an old property really has character and have a nice old world feel to them when you open the top floor window – should the flat you’ve managed to get of the now-divided building be on the top – to look out of it like Ebenezer Scrooge looking for the smallest brat to patronise, both in terms of to use the services of someone (procuring his Christmas turkey, of course) and to be condescending towards them. Today throwing coinage out of a window would get you arrested even if was originally intended for reimbursement, but I digress.

Let us compare said picturesque building with a postcard or a painting. All three are easy on the eye, perhaps to the point of making you feel warm and fuzzy inside. However, all three fail spectacularly at keeping you warm, except when on fire but this is generally frowned upon, or secure. Surprisingly, the postcard and the painting are not designed to keep you warm or, barring psychological conditions, secure. A building is generally designed to be so, but a sash window is a big weakness.

With regards to the issue of heat, a sash window has generally been there a long time and the wooden frames have rotted, been worn away or are generally not in line with their runners. Besides being expensive to restore, this allows draughts through them which make the stupid things rattle, which in turn wears them down further, as well as making you chill your extremities so you could snap them off and serve them in a gin and tonic for a theme party. Even then, restoring them isn’t straightforward due to enough scaffolding being required to recreate Donkey Kong, while replacing them with plastic ones, even UPVC sash windows, is forbidden by conservation area laws and general nimbyism, however tastefully designed the replacements might be. All the while, you go partially deaf whenever there’s wind outside while your heating bill is going through the roof and that’ll need fixing as a consequence (just like that wall between a sensible argument and equivocation-based cheap shots). Considering some houses with these windows filling entire sides of rooms, often with bay windows expanding the area for heat to escape and have ceilings higher than aircraft hangars, protection from draughts and enough glass to stop you heating the air outside is pretty damn important.

With regards to the issue of security, a sash window may be pretty to look at for prospective residents, prospective landlords and prospecting estate agents but it is also alluring to burglars. Single glazing in a very insecure frame borders on asking for it. You’ve got a store window for your stuff that’s bordering on the size of a doorway and you expect someone less morally-guided not to window-shop? If I put a barrel of beer in a room full of people and put a pint glass next to it, am I going to expect the most audacious people not to drink it?

They advertise your possessions – which as a student tend to nigh on all be in your own room anyway – send your heating bills up to prevent you freezing, indirectly harming the environment, rattle in the wind in a way to send someone into madness , are a pain to maintain, impossible to even sympathetically replace and you tell me they’re there because “they look pretty”? Do you put supermodels in control of a nuclear reactor because they’re pleasant to look at? If I had Scrooge’s shilling, I wouldn’t be opening the double-glazing to get some pre-pubescent urchin to buy me meat products, I’d be chasing you into the realm of common sense with it as a potential projectile.

3. Property Mismanagement Companies

Landlords, much maligned as they are and unfairly so in most cases, are often busy people with jobs and careers of their own besides living off your rent. In the same way you would entrust a favourite pet to someone who knows how to look after it when you go on holiday (well, all of them, I don’t think “Sorry Fido, you’re starving this fortnight while I feed Tibbles” would go down well with the RSPCA), they entrust their property, which they are liable for the maintenance, expenditures and legal issues surrounding, to a company with lots of other properties owned by other people they look after. They take a cut of the incoming rent and look after it in case you’re too busy, too far away and the like. Sounds good on paper doesn’t it? Does it work? Does it fuck.

You are all probably aware of what happens when you let a teenager “house sit”. They know the burden lies with someone else if they do something excessively untoward. Management companies work in the same way: Get the most they can out of the situation with as little expenditure as possible on their part. If a pillar on the stairwell’s broken, bodge it with a piece of two-by-four. If something electrical isn’t working, fudge the wiring at the least expense possible. If furniture needs replacing, get cheap and weak office-based stuff. I’m sure you get the general pattern: It’s not my stuff so I don’t damn well care unless I get paid.

The place where I experienced the might and wisdom of the Property Management Company was in the case of  a Exeter-based landlord who had but the one or two properties in Bristol. It was understandable why he entrusted the said PMC with it given the distance. In return, we looked around a top-floor-flat of a period property with beautiful interior features, with three black bin bags of pizza boxes, rotting and leaking onto the carpets, with two iron marks and three four major ink stains on the carpets, cigarette burnmarks and ash everywhere, a kitchen that was buried under rubbish and generally neglected. It was a shame, but considering the designer mail-order catalogues lying around, they were obviously well-loved people, too darling to their parents to be hurt and tired by any sort of introduction to common sense. Where the PMC were at fault was simple, as we would eventually learn after we’d chosen to move in and met the beleaguered landlord (who had moved into the place for a week before we moved in to get it professionally cleaned top and bottom, ordering replacement furniture for what was damaged): they’d let this continue for six months after the he had complained about the condition and they had allowed it to deteriorate. If anything, it fostered a strong link between us as tenants and the landlord himself. If they carried on like that, they were goners. We wanted to keep the place in good shape and worked well as a team for the year.

Such teamwork being just as well. You’ll probably notice that my tone in this section has been fairly matter of fact and not my usual irreverent style. The PMC in question don’t need any further expansion. These next few cases in point take the mick enough without me having to add anything.

The first incident was to do with the heating. The combination (hot water/central heating) boiler in the flat was a temperamental, cheap piece of equipment but it served a purpose. Long story short, it had an operating pressure of 0.5-3.0 bar, ideally 1.5, at least above 0.5. One winter morning, we woke up, freezing our backsides and other bodily parts off through the damn sash windows and without any hot water for the shower, as my unfortunate flatmate found out that morning to our collective – well, me and the other housemate’s – amusement. Such jollity was short-lived as we realised the readout on the device was blinking with a big “0.5″ on the display. The pressure had dropped below operating levels, we had no manual for the darn thing as it was a cheap brand and we’d have to pay a silly price for one on the internet and get it posted (students and paying for things are not bosom buddies when alternatives are available). We got the PMC involved who said they’d send someone out. In the meantime, we knew a radiator which had been leaking rusty water slowly onto the carpet (corroded bleed valve) had recently been repaired, so pressure had escaped that way that won’t any more. The sensible course of action was to open the inlets and fill the thing back up with water. However, being new to this, I caused an airlock in the device which we had to wait to pass before we could restart it.

The PMC’s guy comes around, spends 5 minutes there and writes four words, “Nothing wrong: tampered with”. Any tenant with sense would have looked up what to do so as to not get hypothermia and I went by the best source I could find. The landlord rangs, rather unassuming of the diagnosis and condemnation entailed and sent his own trusted contractor out the next day as in the meantime, my housemates, returning earlier than me, reset the thing after the airlock had passed and got the thing working. He searches fully, finds a valve in the unit itself has blown and got limescale in it, requiring a replacement. Besides, if the device wasn’t intended to be t0pped up every now and again to keep it working, why did they leave the fill loop on the device?

The second monumental failure was electrical safety testing. They found a device had been wired illegally using a spur and needed to be disconnected. They also found that telling us was clearly not the best idea so we discover the device isn’t working suddenly one day. We then inform the PMC, like we should do, who send someone around to service the device and finds that the device has no fault, just no power. An electrician is sent by the landlord who thoroughly investigates the situation, discovers the problem and re-wires the device in a suitable fashion. What are we left with to show for it all? The electrical safety certificate for last year that we already have, not the one for the most recent check. There’s a sitcom episode in that somewhere.

The third and final insulting cock-up was very severe. It snowed that February. It sent the city into beautiful, white fluffy chaos and left nothing untouched. Genuine postcard material. I went to bed that evening with my housemates away through illness or a conference to hear a dripping noise. This is hardly earth-shattering in itself, but sent me around the flat for 10 minutes checking every tap and the shower – as well as the aforementioned possessed boiler – to make sure there wasn’t a drip or leak. Not one was to be found. Being awake at 1.30am trying to figure out where a random drip is coming from was far from settling. So I follow the sound very carefully, slowly edging towards it when I realise it sounds like it’s coming from my housemate’s bedroom. “Only a radiator in there”, I thought, “and the demonic heating appliance hasn’t lost pressure, so it can’t be that”.

I open the door and find three-quarters of the carpet is sodden, his bed drenched and the ceiling covered in about 15 drips along the joins in the boards. Cue an hour of throwing any towel, tea towel or kitchen roll I can onto the floor to soak up the water and counting the blessings that his computer stuff is in an obscure island of calm. After that’s finished I get address labels and cling film to channel all the drips into one place, and put a washing-up bowl underneath to protect the place from further damage in a bodge worthy of a 60-minute makeover show.

Now, water is well-known to be a problem for properties. Leave it there and you could get damp in future years. Water damage could have affected anything in the loft above the room, the roof or the ceiling, as well as it swamping nearly the entire of my mate’s room. Such a serious issue as this I relay to the PMC at first light, warts, torrents and kitchen-consumables-and-office-supplies-on-the-ceiling all. Their response?

“Well, we probably couldn’t get someone out today, could it wait until tomorrow?”

The landlord and the property owner get straight on the act when I contact them, get someone to look the roof, get a dehumidifier and a specialised vacuum cleaner for the water. The snow had thawed from one day’s fall, melted then gone up the divides due to not being able to get past the ice, then refrozen during the next snowfall to force the tiles slightly apart. All was eventually restored. The landlord’s quick action meant small issues, moderate faults and titanic acts of wanton stupidity from the PMC weren’t to the detriment of us or the property, but meant he had to step in, from 60 miles away, for a company that he hired to do this in the first place. His diligence (and possibly some typically student-mentality interim fixes until he could make it) was beyond a credit and perhaps his promptness in action telling of how much his trust in the PMC had waned.

This story has a happy ending: my two housemates and another friend (who filled the void I had to leave in moving to another city) are currently enjoying said flat in good accord with the landlord, who in mutual agreement and with full consideration between all four dropped the PMC rent-skimmers like a volcanic ash cloud over Europe.

Too soon?

4. The Olde Fashionede Junke Maile Deluge-e

New places have obviously been vacant for a while before you move in. Picture the scene: You’ve just signed the deal, paid any outstanding balances/deposits/rents and you’re just dying to get in, kick the door open and make the place your own. You’ve got the key in your hand, elated with having closed the deal and not having to worry about finding a roof on your head anymore… what’s the first obstacle?

Not sorting out the fusebox and finding which ones need replacing. Not failing to understand the electricity/gas meters. Not even where you put the teabags for the first settling-in cup of tea. You don’t even get to see the darn kitchen as there’s half a rainforest interspersed with plastic wraps being an impromptu door-wedge in the way, making you have to shoulder-charge the door to even see the place. Let alone move that long trail of pre-emptively ordered furniture in.

Concessions have to be made here so some junk mail which proves to be half-useful. Any random community magazines might let you have some idea as to events to get involved with where you are. The takeaway menus let you know what you can expect to shovel down your gullet when you’re feeling too lazy to cook. The national pizza-chain voucher cards mean you end up getting twice as much junk for the price of the originally extortionately-priced stretched dough with tomato and herbs reconstituted in a bucket, processed cheese you could use as an eraser and a bare covering of other augments scattered half-heartedly on the top. To be fair, besides gatecrashing events and stuffing your lazy face for a delusional price, there’s not much to it. Even then the local five Chinese takeaways and four curry houses have been audacious enough to drop seven takeaway menus of their own EACH through the doorway, but as the offers are different, the layout of the generic cuisine-specific clipart or two of them differ the other five by 10p an item, you’re flummoxed as to which is the most up to date and have to spend hours deducing which is the accurate price list. You soon learn what the local paper recycling policy is.

There’s always the mountain of the previous resident’s bills, magazines and mail order catalogues that give you a half-baked impression of what they were. As well as the resident before that, the two or three before them and sometimes beyond. A roll of honour you get used to the names of, day in, day out and then slap a “Return To Sender” over the top of. Without end. You ring up the companies who supplied the utilities to the people on the letters to tell them they’re not there anymore, just to get sent around a loop of departments for an hour of your own time and then get cut off. They continue to spam you with dead tree with a plastic window that you can’t legally open, you return them to sender with them failing to get the point that they’re not there despite it being in capital letters and you’ve added an hour to the phone bill for the sake of consideration of others. Evidently, I clearly enjoy writing pretty blatant notes that I don’t have six psuedonyms and being told I’m in denial. Perhaps with ten bounces of the same damn letter, I’ll get a superhero cape befitting an unnecessary list of false identities. Perhaps then I could choose a superhero power that would thwart the evil plans of call-centres and corporate ignorance to boot. That said, a comic book with a hero bestowed with the power of making obvious suggestions wouldn’t sell too well.

Even when the first swamping is cleared, you get trickles of other people’s mail who no longer live where you are. Their driving licence renewal notices. Their education magazines. Their random goth fashion catalogues which evokes memories of past residents and their curious habits when you speak to your new neighbours. After a while, some things ask for a little added force…

Spam spam spam spam...

…and you don’t care if they don’t get the point with excessively obscure references. They seemingly can only tell the difference if it’s shaped like a stamp, makes a rustling noise in a nearby bush or moves in front of them. It’s a petty annoyance, I admit, but it’s consistent. If someone hits you hard on the side of the head with a nail, it’s quick and promptly over; junk-mail is everyone else’s laziness with an electric drill to your temple and pulsing your head at a random point, every day, without reprieve.

5. I Knew It, This Place Was Previously Inhabited By Assholes!

You may have noticed a common theme in the above four points. Whether it’s actions, views on aesthetics/sentiment, failing miserably to satisfy obligations or leaving you with a paper trail large enough to fill  your newly-acquired abode by not informing the world they’ve sodded off to somewhere else, the link between all these issues is other people’s faults. However, it is worth noting that with these big, in-your-face issues you learn to deal with. You act doubly quickly to counteract lazy people who are meant to stop the place falling apart. You keep three layers on, polar-expedition style, while watching your stuff and security like a hawk with the daft wooden guillotines that are sash windows. You make sure you have a mountainous heap of earplugs – or failing that, strong spirits – to get to something vaguely resembling sleep when you live in the zoo. Problems give rise to solutions, however reluctant you may be to be forced to resort to them in the face of the human mindlessness and stupidity that’s been forced on you. You’re naturally inclined to feel good when your foresight has prevented the walls falling down, you sliding around the floors enveloped in a seven cubic feet ice-cube or the entire place going up in a fiery ball visible from space when you wanted to make cheese on toast. So what’s left to complain about?

It’s the tiny, tiny gremlins that cause the largest issues. The most insignificant of problems that beset your day-to-day you feel bad for being affected by.  The ones where you think “surely that landlord knew about this” or “he could have done something sooner” or “why does it annoy me so much?”. The ones you then realise you were stuck with because someone else was exhibiting the IQ of a mutilated cabbage. Cutterunts have ruined your house for you and not told you. Sometimes with the junk mail and the state of the place as you move in, you’re left to wonder if the morons were completely bereft of the ability to communicate with anything resembling a human being; this could however just be my bitterness.

Water seems to be the bane of many of the places I’ve lived in; from a storage tank freezing and pushing surplus water over the sides through my ceiling as a child, to the snow-melt intrusion I mentioned earlier to my current outpost. It doesn’t matter where I seem to live, it seems over-eager to greet me unexpectedly, escaping its pipes, tanks and tubes like an excitable hamster with an attitude problem. I moved into my present flat with a big sign telling me not to use the shower due to leaks, because the shower was mounted by someone on wrong side of the bath, as a result of which, it dripped behind a lip and through the gap in the wall the bath was mounted in. Adding to this, as the bathroom wasn’t tiled all the way to the top of the walls or properly waterproofed, water ran behind the tiles. Someone clearly installed it with forethought, planning and a pick-axe implanted in their skull. I had to put up with it for two months before I could shower, as only then the workmen turned up to do the bath replacement and tile installation. Which they were hired for. Before the summer had started. I was warned and this was fair enough. I took the risk on before I moved in. The stress-relieving properties of baths were suddenly doubly appreciated. Yet, I’ve never managed to get so much water around the back as to soak the floor and imagine a previous resident unscrewed the hose. After all, my neighbour below told me one imbecile unscrewed the bath waste water pipe to try to clean it. When you see only one thing holding something to something else, it’s obviously a service screw, isn’t it? It’s mainly there to look pretty and make you feel secure about water safety when you’re scrubbing the filth off your vile body. Wait a minute… secure? Did someone drop a penny?

Water has been a problem in the kitchen too. My washed clothes were coming out of the machine cold. This usually doesn’t bode well for the clothes or the machine. Has it got up to temperature to dissolve the detergent effectively? Has it filled the machine with undissolved detergent that’ll make the spin cycles sound like a cement mixer with emphysema? I merely thought the “are they clean” concern too obvious. Hey, I’m a scientist, of course I over-analyse things. I look at the machine’s back and realise a hot feed hasn’t been connected. Someone did their laundry with freezing cold water all the time. I also realise as soon as this happens, the world and its dog rings you to express an opinion that the machine might heat up its own water. Despite having a hot inlet with a sticker on the back saying that you shouldn’t operate the device unless both feeds are connected, the deluge will continue for weeks, when the word gets out that you’re not using a hot feed. Not exactly a dirty secret – unless you’ve got a curry-stained shirt – but suddenly everyone knows. Have you ever had a phonecall from the world’s dog about white goods? Let’s just say its awkward. The little sod sometimes tries to reverse the charge too. So I hook it up, blitz it with a volcanic temperature wash to remove the soapy grit of the years and my clothes are suddenly a lot fresher. Pat on back, beer in hand, go to house party and feel damn good that you’ve taken that problem off the agenda.

Having come back from said house party, I discovered the floor to be a little shinier than usual and then, soon after, my feet to be a little damper than usual. All hands on deck, towels everywhere and paper towels strewn on the floor in a flurry – like the Tazmanian Devil whirlwinding through a convenience store – to soak up the water. Twenty minutes and somewhat more bedraggled then upon entry (which is somewhat bedraggled post-party and 45 minute walk, I can assure you) I’ve soaked up the water I could find. All the while, the washing machine drum has a boating lake inside it and a buoy in the form of a stray sock. Thankfully, the water inlets have valves under the adjacent sink so I can just turn them off post-wash, but some fool running the machine without hot water has weakened the seals on the hot water inlet. Someone before me either didn’t know how to wash clothes, didn’t know what clean clothes were like or just removed the hot inlet to avoid the problem whilst ignoring the big warning sticker in big letters. Red isn’t for warning in this bold new era, ladies and gentlemen, it’s for flagrant ignorance. The landlord of course couldn’t have known about it because usually people don’t do a test wash in the washing machine, a test sing in the shower and a test cheese-on-toast under the grill.

All of this pales into insignificance compared to the heater with chinchilla-ed cables. I had just got the keys and had my stuff in the flat in crates. In that happy phase that follows sealing a deal and knowing you’re not going to live in a cardboard box in a new city, I go through the obligatory processes of understanding a new flat: turning the hot water on, checking the fuse box and RCDs are all on so you can turn the lights on, make tea and cook your food, then realising it’s getting late, try to turn on the heaters. This was an electric heater with a convector unit on the front for immediate use, foreign land for me, so I turn the switch on gingerly and hold a hand out to see if heat’s coming out. The obligatory smell of dust faded to be replaced with a smell of burning plastic which didn’t bode well. Nothing in the grills, nothing in the convector in the front, nothing under the unit… but the cable to the convector unit, tucked around the back of it so as to hide it (in the four-inch clearance above the floor), is covered in parcel tape, with black-lined and expanding holes in it, as well as glowing yellow wire cores emerging from the holes. I hit the switches faster than Cape Canaveral playing whack-a-mole and recoil to a safe distance.

The landlord comes over with a new plug and cable and we get to work. Hoover the dust up so he can work on it without coughing and spluttering and haul out the treasure trove of random crap. A Blockbuster’s card, a takeaway menu, two random screws and cocktail stick. Stuff safes, an electric heater is the last place they’ll look for it. Also visible is a set of four tarry trails suspiciously positioned above where the cable’s patch was. Unwrapping the cable reveals that the insulation is burnt more on the outside than the inside as though a cigarette was dropped on it, but not just dropped on an electrical cable, through a heater. Who in their right mind would drop a cigarette into an electrical heater? Was she – I have this on the landlord’s authority, not being sexist or even mildly fauxvinistic – trying to light the thing on the heater itself? To cap off nearly causing a biomass fire to be followed with an electrical fire, the tenant in question obviously believed that parcel tape was a fantastic electrical insulator in two layers (although to bestow credit when it was due, at least they didn’t leave bare wires exposed, showing there was at least a D in GCSE Science there).

Mutually flabbergasted by the discoveries inside the heater, we replace the cable, stare agog in disbelief at the removed and well-frazzled cable, then test the unit. It worked, job done, landlord’s diligence meaning I didn’t freeze for a problem actively hidden from him. However, like all the demons of the flat, they had a secondary surprise lined up for me. It then came to figuring out the back night-storage unit, the cable for which (the second one and untouched as yet) had a small bit of parcel tape on it, but continues to work fine with no visible damage to the cable, besides a passing scuff mark, probably where the cigarette that buggered up the first one did a drive-by melting on it. I move the other cable to prevent it leaning on the parcel tape to prevent a problem and, in an act of contradiction (or Newton’s Third Law), it swings square onto it. A large spark, five centimetres from my hands, then the RCD plunges the flat into darkness. There are fewer things scarier than having bare hands so close to an near an electrical spark. There are probably fewer things more annoying for the poor old landlord than having a tenant whose problem you’ve just resolved ring up to report something similar – albeit this time with spectacular special effects – happening straight after you’ve fixed the first.

To conclude these macabre tables of human negligence and stupidity, the wire was damaged on the inside and all these small niggles are fixed and electrically certified. The shower doesn’t flood out my neighbour or threaten to fry her, but overheats unless you have it on a low setting due to a technicality when it came to tiling the bathroom. The washing machine works as before, but I still have to fix the pump. The grill element couldn’t be replaced, meaning I returned from my little hiatus to find a Halogen hob and new grill/oven put in. Cheese-on-toast in abundance at last, as well as being able to turn the hobs up to 12. Take that, Spinal Tap!

My earlier point however remains: when you move into a new place, some things will always be wrong and your first instinct will probably be, “The landlord must have known this was wrong. I’ve been swindled! I’ve been conned! A pawn in a conniving pact between landlord and estate agent!”, except probably a lot shorter and explicitly worded. However, the landlord can’t know everything in the place without being there every second of every hour of every day, which would be unreasonable, as well as dangerous precedent for the interests of privacy, making ID cards look suddenly like a harmless compulsory proof-of-age scheme. Remember, however stupid, nonsensical and an affront to the notions of natural/anthropic selection their actions may have seemed, the lunatics have had the sense to cover their tracks, almost as though they knew they were doing something wrong, had the intelligence to hide it, yet somehow not to report it or fix it properly. The negligent morons have hidden the problems.

Lean on the doors, batten down the hatches, the morons are getting smarter…