The date for the arrival of the Washing Machine version of the Star Ship Enterprise was a surprise which would be vouchsafed unto me in a telephone call. I spent time stressing that I have a landline, which means that I do not have a telephone in my pocket, that you have to let it ring until I get there. This is the result of interesting experience. Usually the people who get me out of the shower are cold callers trying to sell me something, but you never know.
Waiting for the store to inform me of the day of arrival, and having paid for the old machine to be removed and the new one to be installed, I then began to doubt myself.
In anticipation I began to clear the utility room for the installers. You would not believe how much junk can assemble itself in a utility room. I had had a deep counter top fitted over the machines, which had collected numerous bottles of elderly wines and the sort of gift wines made from grated quills and gooseberries housed in a half timbered bottle that people bring back from holiday because they were a really cheap gift intended to make you believe that they were thinking of you in cold rainy Britain whilst lying on a sunbed in Alicante.
Every bit of rubbish I cleared revealed more flooding on the floor.
Could it really all be coming from one antiquated washing machine?
If ever you lack something to keep you awake at night, I cannot recommend wondering where the water is coming from too highly. Therefore, paddling, I pushed many pieces of newspaper under the dishwasher and the washing machine. Were they in cahoots? Did they have a suicide pact? Where was the water coming from, so very endlessly.
Finally on Saturday evening a piece of coloured A4 emerged from below the dishwasher, clutching elderly fluff with a light coating of dry filth. So it is just the washing machine after all.
On Friday I had been informed that the arrival would be on Sunday and that a phone call on the day would acquaint me with the hour or, even, half hour in question. Any fool with less experience of life would then confidently go about their normal work out or gardening. I waited, still cleaning in proximity to the landline, for the call.
As the afternoon wore on and the OH’s pleas to ‘ring them! ring them!’ became ever more urgent I checked the order form and discovered that the hours of work and white goods delivery were from 7 in the AM until 8 of the Evening. On a Sunday! I had finally found a job with worse hours than those that hurl packages down the drive from nine till five.
We gave in and started to make tea at which point a huge white van drew up outside.
The delivery, removal and installation were singularly simple.
So it was not until three loads of washing were on the line that I noticed that SS Enterprise had landed in a puddle. The puddle was under the left corner. but where was it coming from?
I am surprised that you don’t see water entering marathons, because it is undoubtedly, very, very runny.
So I rang the store and was advised to return upon the morrow.
So, thinketh the new reader, you went back, got a replacement and that was it right? Right?
The next episode will be posted when I have recovered from my dental trip, which featured irremovably set dental glue and two encounters with an unmarked police car, with sirens.
And, of course there will be cyber crime, currently very fashionable.
And it’s only Tuesday.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~