Water

The foyer in the building where I work has, as its centrepiece, a water feature. A huge brown stone monolith of odd angles and aesthetically engineered drops that guarantee a playful background plash of water whenever a visitor drops in to spend a week’s wages on a cup of tea in the café.

Or at least is does when the bloody thing is working.

Unfortunately it hasn’t worked for about a year. It was turned off last winter due to suspicions of “a small leak”.

I guess this is an occupational hazard for a water feature. That and people lobbing pound coins down the plughole or going for a number 2 down the chute.

For various reasons it wasn’t looked into. It got overlooked. The water feature became a dusty dry stone sculpture that only dreamt of the cool flow of legionella rich water gently caressing its chiselled corners.

Until this week. The idea of restoring water to the “desert” feature suddenly became “of the moment”. It became my task for the week. My pre-Christmas mission.

Experts were called in and assembled. Opinions were voiced. An agreement was reached. Existence of the leak needed to be empirically proven or disproven one way of the other.

So an experiment was launched. The water was switched back on. The algae on the stone was moistened with H20 once more.

Like all water features, ours works by recycling the same water round and round. The continual movement prevents stagnation and bacterial build-up. A simple ball-cock mechanism adds fresh mains water whenever necessary to compensate water lost by evaporation or hoodies taking a rare bath. Yesterday, once the system was up and running, we disabled the ball-cock. With no fresh water topping up the system we’d soon be able to see if we were losing any.

We started at 3pm and my brief was to switch the thing off at 5pm when I went home and then back on again tomorrow morning at 9.

At the most we were expecting maybe an inch of water to disappear.

Instead, at 5pm I was gobsmacked to discover that not only was the water feature dry but the entire reservoir tank was also empty. The pump was gamely sucking up hot air.

Where had all that water gone? Several gallons of it had vanished down into the guts of the building in the space of 2 hours without any evidence of it ever having been there.

We have a mystery on our hands.

Further investigations will take place today. I daresay some dull, prosaic explanation will be found. Personally I’d like to imagine that the water has escaped into another dimension, possibly feeding a waterfall in Narnia or topping up a jacuzzi for a couple of half naked elf maidens.

Or perhaps, like a recent episode of Doctor Who, the water has taken on a sinister life of its own and is, even as I write, seeking out some poor unwitting human host whose body can be possessed and turned to some dastardly scheme of world domination. Indeed, it may explain the congregation of strange gentlemen who daily hang around the front of my work building, foaming at the nose with various sized cans of Special Brew growing out of their bottom lips and who have an undissuadable penchant for defecating up the pilasters.

It’s something in the water, I’m telling you...

Ring My Ding-a-ling-a-ling

Today has been a strange day.

I was off sick Thursday and Friday and returned to work today, brave soldier that I am, only partially recovered but prepared to stand and face the bullets of the French or the Germans or whoever it is we don’t like as a nation anymore.

And instead found something worse than bullets.

My desk was full of notes and messages – hastily scrawled missives from colleagues and work-mates who in my absence did their best to stem the inevitable flow of entropy and dissolution which is my daily bread and butter.

(Should any of you find yourself in Hell in the afterlife I guarantee you’ll find the entire place plastered with post-it notes...)

Among the lists of malfunctioning equipment and diabolical break-downery that hurt my brain this morning was a plea to recover a ring from one of our sinks. It seems some poor woman – let’s call her Joanna Public – managed to dislodge a bit of bling while scrubbing her dannies yesterday and was most eager to have it recovered if at all possible.

Well, I am always eager to perform acts of possibility and so set to work with a screwdriver and little else (though possibly a modicum of goodwill) and managed to remove the trap from beneath the sink that catches all solid matter – or indeed any matter that just happens to be heavier than the water that has washed it down there in the first place.

It wasn’t a pleasant job. The water was black and thick. Mucoid, if there is such a word (my spellchecker is questioning it with an angry red underline). It looked like Sigourney Weaver’s stomach lining after she’d been impregnated with one of them Alien thingies.

And yes I made the age old mistake of pouring the contents down the very sink I’d just removed the trap from so that the water splashed straight down to the floor. Doh!

But I did recover the ring.

Which upon closer inspection was disappointing. I was expecting gold. I was expecting silver. I was expecting a sparkly stone the size of Jeremy Clarkson’s chin.

Instead I got a rather dowdy looking blackened band of indeterminate metal with a dull, very opaque green stone set into the middle of it.

My first thought was: Christ, I hope it wasn’t the water in the trap that did that. But, upon further examination, I suspect it may have been the ring that did that to the water. However, there is no accounting for taste and I am sure the sentimental value of the ring completely outweighs any snobbery I may harbour towards its true monetary value.

Well, it had better. I’d hate to think I’d swilled my fingers through watery vomit for something that fell out of a Christmas cracker alongside a plastic comb and a tiny plastic spinning top that refuses to spin.

Oh what do I care, really? The job was done and I was just glad to be able to ring (ha ha) Joanna Public up and say that I had saved her ring from a fate worse than missing. It isn’t something I get to say very often, after all, and I made sure I relished the opportunity.

A happy ending.

Unlike the hours I then spent reviewing our CCTV footage to catch two middle aged women setting fire to a bin bag dumped outside the building last night for no other reason that it appeared to amuse them.

The resultant fire wasn’t huge and thankfully a staff member happened to spot the blaze and douse it with a good old fashioned bucket of H2O.

I have then spent the rest of the day wading through conversations with police, staff and alarm engineers who have all given me the distinct impression that I am pouring black, vomity water down a sink without a trap onto my own feet once more...

With no ring this time – dud or precious – to make the activity seem at all worthwhile...

*sigh*

Where’s Frodo Baggins when you need him, eh?

Tatered

After an extremely busy weekend I feel absolutely done-in. So apologies to anyone expecting a post sparkling with my usual wit and bonhomie. At the moment my eyes are gummed up with fatigue and my brain powered down with the same.

Not a pretty sight. But then I’m not much cop on a good day either.

An eventful day off on Friday saw Karen and I lunching together at a lovely Thai restaurant in Stratford, watching our boy perform in his school assembly and then hotfooting it to the cinema to see Spiderman 3... which I actually enjoyed. I used to get the Spiderman comic as a kid so Spidey always has appeal – Kirsten Dunst is just an added bonus. Mind you I wasn’t sure about her “jazz club singing” in this particular outing. Still easy on the eye often means deaf to the ear...

Saturday was taken over by a phenomenal bout of pregnancy related toothache that afflicted Karen from the outset. Cue various phone calls to NHS Direct, cue endless waiting for unsympathetic doctors to call back and refer us on somewhere else and then somewhere else and then somewhere else that referred us back to the original number. It was like some kind of tortuous dance. Once we’d jumped through enough hoops we were finally allowed to see a doctor at the hospital (by which time Karen was screaming in agony) to get some industrial strength painkillers which could dull the pain and not harm the baby.

God I love the NHS.

Sunday saw us trying to catch up on all we’d missed on Saturday – house chores, gardening chores, shopping chores and in between I did some work on a web site I’ve been commissioned to build for a local chauffeur company. Once it’s completed I will no doubt post a link to it on this ‘ere blog.

And now here I am at work on Monday wondering where the hell the weekend went.

Work is great fun today. All the bad weather last week resulted in leaks bursting forth everywhere and much warping of wood. Guess who’s having to spearhead the clean up / repair operation?

Yep.

I’m in me galoshes once again.

It’s non stop glamour, my life...

Pig Off

After yesterday’s sense of humour by-pass I’m pleased to report that today has been imbued with a much more sanguine atmosphere. I’ve even been known to crack a smile in the last half hour.

The engineers have performed their diagnostics and have confidently laid the blame for yesterday’s indoor deluge at the foot of that singularly familiar blight of modern day living: mechanical failure. Basically the calibration of the humidifier’s sensor was completely awry and the pressure switch which acts as a safety valve to turn the machine off had also failed hence it was producing water vapour on a never ending cycle of Terminator style wanton destruction resulting in dripping condensation on the scale of Wookey Hole caves.

No. That explanation didn’t mean a thing to me either.

But it has allowed me to purchase a T-shirt with the words "See it wasn’t my fault at all ya mean-eyed bunch of gobshites!" emblazoned across the chest.

Vindication – it’s a marvellous thing.

Porker

This has not been a good day.

Woken at 5 am by the boy deciding to get up and watch TV (needless to say he was sent back to bed with a flea in his ear), I found it impossible to get back to sleep despite being desperately dog-tired.

Arrived at work bleary eyed to find one of the humidifier units in our main art store at the gallery where I work had gone haywire over the weekend. Result: massive condensation all over the (idiotically) metal ceiling and water pooling and dripping everywhere. Disaster clue: art work and water do not mix.

Spent the entire day chasing various engineers, “experts” and insurance bods to try and get a mess cleared up which my guilt complex says everybody is blaming me for.

Summary: I feel like I haven’t achieved a damn thing.

It’s been, to coin a phrase, a real pig of a day.