“Oh, we can’t guarantee when he’ll be delivering the new dishwasher”, they told my Mum. “Sometime on Thursday, definitely. But the drivers make up their own schedules to inflict maximum inconvenience on their customers. We can hear them giggling over the radio as they work them out. It’s an ugly sound, yet strangely compelling, like the sound of sweet young dreams being crushed under the jackboots of experience. You can pay an extra £25 and that will guarantee that he will turn up at a specific, 100% guaranteed time, give or take 12 hours either side for unforseen circumstances. Or can I interest you in collecting it yourself from our depot in St. Kilda?”
(That’s the spirit of what they said to my Mum. I may have embellished a little).
So – this morning, my Mum went off for her thrice-weekly dialysis treatments at the normal time, 6am. She didn’t knock on my door so I didn’t wake. My alarm was set for 8am. “8am,” I thought to myself, “is enough time to get up, have a shower, see what items of furniture the dogs have destroyed today, grab a very strong coffee and cower in a corner at the thought of the day ahead.”
6.55am. BANGBANGBANGBANG on the front door.
“Now then matey,” he said brightly when I opened the door explosively and grabbed him by the throat. “Blimey, cor, you took your time, incha?”
My mum got this new dishwasher from a “catalogue”. For anyone who hasn’t experienced them, these are glossy-paged encyclopaedic books representing shops that exist somewhere in postal-space, selling items at ludicrous prices that “don’t matter because you can pay on the drip”.
Where items are too big to go in the mail, catalogues employ Demons to drive vans and deliver straight to your front door at WTF-o’clock precisely. Normal human office hours mean nothing to them. They don’t sleep, they don’t feel pain (an important trait when you’re a lorry-driver in Britain in December) and they don’t get paid. Their reward is your expression when you open the door.
This morning, at 7.10am, after I said that I would plumb the dishwasher in myself so it’d be really great if he could just leave it in the kitchen and **** off, and as he walked back to his van, soot-streaked from negotiating the fires of Perdition…I could tell that this one really loved his job.
Image: krazydad/jbum
You can plumb things?! Ooh!
I can plumb a few things. If they’re really easy to plumb.
But across the whole spectrum of potential plumbing, a better and more accurate way to put it is “I can’t plumb things”.
(But I can follow very, very easy instructions).
(As long as they’re very easy).
So…… how did this plumbing adventure go….. easy instructions I hope?
I cannot list the ways in which this version of delivery Hell differs from Italian delivery Hell. The only point of resemblance is that no one gives a s*£$%. One Italian variation is that if anyone who had a hand in the delivery really liked the dishwasher, they’d have taken it and delivered you the empty box.
wooowww… 6.55? that IS Britain… nobody sane does anything substantial before 8.30 over here…