Stupid bloody work- and delivery-men

I HATE fucking workmen and fucking delivery men. Why can they never do as they say they're going to do? Why? Why must they do this? So many times now I have waited in ALL day for some sort of delivery or engineer, only for them not only not to come on time, but not even to come at all! And even worse, sometimes they say they DID come, but that you must have been out! Why would they even say that? When you've been sat there all day, not really doing anything, waiting, wasting your life for them, in order for them to do some tiny thing that'll probably only take half an hour. How many human hours must have been wasted in this way, with people all over the globe sat in their houses, looking out the window occasionally, wondering why "between 9 and 12" always seems to mean "maybe by 5 if you're lucky, if at all, if we feel like it".

And of course you can't ring them up and ask where they are, because if you ring too early they'll just say "well they can come any time up until [insert made up and unlikely time here]". So you have to wait, and wait, and wait, until it's 5pm and you KNOW they're not coming, and then you ring them (or wait until the next day because unfortunately our office is now closed, office hours are BLAH to FUCK) and they say "oh yes, they didn't come. Can you be in next Tuesday between 6am and 11.33pm?" DON'T THEY REALISE PEOPLE HAVE THINGS TO DO IN THE DAY?????????????? ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGH!

Death to all workmen, death to all delivery men, death to anyone who comes anywhere near me and my crimson glare of death in the next half hour.

Fork it over and hope for the best

I had the washing machine repair man in this morning, in order to fix our machine's sudden penchant for washing things for so long that they dissolve. He seemed nice enough, and had a poke round inside it, and then decided that it wasn't the control board which had gone (which is expensive) but was instead the heating element. It was quite a quick thing to replace, and would cost £98 for the part and the labour, so I let him do it (only took about half an hour), and then he was off.

Now, was £98 a good price? I just don't know. And that's what I hate about anything to do with tradesmen or car mechanics or anything like that. You just have to take their word for it, hopefully ask a few pertinent questions so it sounds like you're not an idiot, and then you just pay them whatever they ask.

I tried to watch him fairly carefully, and at one point I thought he might be ripping me off. He showed me the heating element after he'd taken it out, and it was all caked in limescale, and he said that because of that the heating element would have been working extra hard to heat the water until finally it burnt out. OK, sounds alright so far. And then when he went outside to get a new one from his van, I looked out the window and saw him banging the old one on the kerb, bashing the limescale off. And I thought fuck, what if he's going to bash some of the limescale off, it'll start working again, and then he'll just put the old one back in? And after that I watched him like a hawk, making him coffee so I could stay in the kitchen, and flitting around doing things so I could keep an eye on what happened. He definitely brought a new element in with the old one, it was silver and shiney and in a packet, and at the end he left me the old one - with some limescale removed from the bashing, but clearly old. So unless he fetched a different old one to give me and put the real old one back in, and brought a new one in as a prop, then I'm probably alright.

The machine works now anyway, so I'm just hoping for the best. He might have overcharged me, as I had a look on the internet and don't think heating elements are massively expensive, but I don't think it was a complete rip off... I'm going to stop thinking about it now, it works and he's gone away, I may as well just live with it.

It does make me want to learn some basis skills though, a bit of plumbing and car mechanics and electricianing, just so you can do some things yourself and not be prey to whatever workman you call from the phonebook and might actually understand what they're talking about. Maybe I will... or maybe I'll just carry on paying and hoping.