Plumbers and Builders

I've had a bad relationship with plumbers and builders. I'm trying to think of the word that means a relationship isn't working very well, (is it disfunctional?) This probably stems from the fact that I'm not a confident handyman, not well-endowed (steady...) in the arts of manipulating resistant materials. "Resistant Materials" is what woodwork, metalwork, and plastics are now called at school, instead of just woodwork and metalwork (see, we didn't make anything except model airplanes with plastic when I was at school). I wasn't good at making them do things at school and didn't develop much in the way of DIY post-education. When we moved into our current house, I met our next door neighbour, nice guy, and the first thing he said to me was "Are you 'andy?" So I thought he'd misheard my name, but he meant was I good with tools.

I was about to say that this lack of ability with hammers nails and saws has led us to pay for some bad work, but actually we've probably been lucky, because most of the work we've had done seems to have been good. So why the dissatisfied feeling? Well, it is often difficult to get them to come round to do a quotation and then sometimes they're just too busy to do the work, though I must admit to once having got a plumber out to fit a washer on a bathroom tap that I had broken by trying to fix it myself, on a Bank Holiday. He did come out and fix it, but it was expensive. I know not to try to fix plumbing on Bank Holidays now. Or, it could be that half the time we don't know what the problem is, so we try various fixes for the same problem that don't seem to fix it, for instance damp walls are a mysterious phenomenom that can apparently be caused by all sorts of things, and if only we could know the spefically relevant thing we'd be happy. Fixing car problems has been less difficult, why should that be; are cars more insulated from Nature? Or just always newer and subjected to that endless cycle (spiral?) of renewal, ditching your old car and buying the newer model with all its improvements; better brakes, side-impact bars, better fuel consumption, whereas fixing our house is like keeping a rusty old Ford Cortina on the road. And perhaps that I don't feel at all guilty about not being any good at fixing cars.

Actually what prompted this post - become whinge was a story over on the Velo-Gubbed Legs blog about nmj's boiler engineer being very young. She talks about standing over his shoulder while he worked and that reminded me (obscurely) of my daughter when she was small, standing behind a plumber that we had got to work on our heating. The plumber was recommended to us by friends. He was middle-aged and had a family (he was the guy that came out on a Bank Holiday; at that time I asked him about his family but he wasn't too bothered. I know I'd hate to work on a Bank Holiday, but he seemed happy enough to get away). So my daughter was following this guy round watching what he was doing, she was fascinated (twelve years later she's a lot more self-concious), but I'm not sure what the fascination was, probably just curiosity; I think she was too young to be concerned that he was doing a good job. I must ask her whether she remembers that plumber - she did have a bit of a thing for older men (I mean when she was four), she loved meeting a Father Christmas at my sister's house. She followed him around until he gave her a kiss, then went back for a couple more.