It’s enough to make you want to give up and start crying. Our Scottish water bloke, let’s call him, oh I don’t know, Frank, didn’t show up yesterday as promised. Rather than getting on the contact phone number provided to apologise in person, Frank just logged a “didn’t have time, reschedule” against our issue. And that was that.
Just so it’s clear, the problem was initially notified to Scottish Water on Thursday evening. They advised calling a plumber in the first instance, which I did. The plumber concluded it wasn’t my problem, but Scottish Waters’. He helpfully got on the phone on Friday morning to advise them accordingly. “You’re in the system, but it takes a few days”, he said. When nobody showed by Monday, I phoned to enquire. Helpfully I then found out I was to expect him on Tuesday afternoon.
So this no-show isn’t exactly surprising. But then Frank seems to be busy, and the only guy in the area who can actually come. There has been some mutterings about busyness, but I fail to see how my rising water levels in the front garden can politely remain an inconvenience that awaits an appointment. It’s not long before it’ll start leaching into the foundations of my house and becoming a real problem. I’m very close to going and buying a hand-pump to try and reduce the problem by pumping the water away (presuming that even helps).
At every step, I’ve been polite as I can to the call-centre folk. It’s really not their fault. But Scottish Water are deserving of little more the ire in my view, right now. Not enough staff, uncommunicative ones at that, who’ll simply don’t show-up and don’t actually do the rescheduling unless I phone up and enquire what happened. I’m lucky and work from home, but a lot of people aren’t, and I expect they’d be livid at having to sit at home for somebody to then not show. All this of course before anybody actually does anything. This is just the inspection to identify if it is a problem, and if it’s their responsibility. Getting people out to actually fix it will probably take much longer. And the water will continue to build up in the meantime of course…
Neighbours down the road had a similar problem a few years back (detecting a theme here?), and the hole was dug, then filled in by a jobs-worth who was sent to fill it before any work had been done. So another team of hole diggers came out, before it was fixed. Result was a few weeks of disruption to their front garden (they have just one path into the house from the front. We at least have two), and they certainly weren’t pleased with how they were treated.
So, whilst my postings of late haven’t been hugely frequent, you lucky lucky people can rest assured that I have a new source of frustration to detail on these pages to at least keep a few things appearing.
Once more unto the breach. Rage against the machine. All that. Dealing with a large, privatised, company is going to be fun, I can tell. Elsewhere in the country and Thames water are actually cutting jobs. Sure, not front-line, and voluntary, but the privatisation of services as important as water just seems like a bad idea when you’re trying to get a response out of them, that is going to cost them, for the hundreds of pounds it costs me each year is leaving me decidedly frosty towards this behemoth.
