I
really do meet some interesting people in my line of work. And by ‘interesting’
I probably mean ‘ignorant.’ Today’s Wally-Walking-Round-In-Human-Form was a
chain-smoking gas boiler maintenance engineer from Peterborough, on his way
through to Felixstowe for some reason or other. He walked into a conversation
we were having about heating in our homes. Someone in the queue had turned theirs
off again as the weather is supposed to stay mild for the next ten days or so.
I commended them, but said I was leaving ours on a low setting, as my wife (not
sure if I’ve mentioned this before) is really rather pregnant, and our storage
heaters take ages to warm the house up again if you turn them off and let
everything get cold.
Our
visitor – one of those guys who lets a conversation run before stepping into it
and telling everyone else why they’re wrong – decided to wax lyrical about his
own preferred method of homelife which he insists is ‘the only way to be.’ Part
of it involved him adjusting the thermostat settings in each individual room,
depending on what he might be doing in there at any given part of the day,
which kind of makes economical sense in a way. But the bit that got under my
skin and picked away at my psyche was this – he says he has a plug-in heater
going full-bore in his bedroom every night, while also sleeping with the window
open. When we pressed him as to the logic behind this, he said “I like cool air
to breathe but I hate having cold feet. This way I achieve perfection.”
What
a tool.
I was
overwhelmed by the urge to point out the nonsensical thinking behind his
‘foolproof scheme’, and to mention the environmental catastrophe he was adding
to by ploughing through fossil fuel-based electric running one of the most
energy-inefficient products ever created by Man. But really – what would be the
point? People like him say things like that precisely because they want to get
a reaction of some kind from people like me. So I quietly bit my lip while
waiting for him to head back to his extremely lonely life of driving around on
his own, fixing boilers for other people, and then going home alone to his
lonely hot-and-cold bed.
I’m
not sure I’ve accurately recounted the whole encounter, and I imagine it was a
boring, jumbled mess to read, but typing it all out in this posting has got it
all out of my head and lessened the likelihood of me pushing his head through a
window the next time I see him.
I thank
God I have this blog to moan in or I’d have been sacked from my job a year ago…
RC 7-11-18
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