Tuesday, 6 November 2012

Water, water everywhere


Georgitta cleans the house according to a rough schedule of weekly tasks each Monday morning, without mishap. This week was different, however! Her phone was “spoiled” and I needed to be at a school in the next village to do some INSET at a staff meeting. We arrange for her to leave the key with a friend at the main junction and all would be well.

What we hadn’t anticipated was that my training would be twice as long as expected and my toilet cistern would fall off the wall as Georgitta mopped underneath it!!!! Of course my phone was turned off through the training, as I try to set good examples. She was running around the town looking for someone who knew my number or where I’d gone.

Anyway, eventually I opened the door to be met by a tide of water spreading across the sitting room and the cistern in my bathroom hanging on by one bracket. The stop cock was there beside it but then Georgitta would never have been familiar with a flushing toilet, may indeed never have seen one before she met mine! I am so proud of my plumbing skills. I thought attaching a new kitchen tap was pretty good, but this demanded even greater skills.

I mopped up 2 hours of running water before remembering there was a redundant toilet with a dodgy ball cock in the house. Within 30 minutes I had fixed the whole problem. Despite the brackets and cistern failing to be equidistant, which may have put undue pressure on the protruding peg, It all screwed in nicely and the hardest job was getting the pipe into the back of the bowl.
The skills I have mastered through this VSO placement are beyond belief. I can feel a second career coming on………………….. possibly one more lucrative than the last!

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