Can I be the only person who is shocked that whenever celebrities reply to those magazine questionnaires (the ones that ask: “Whom do you most admire?”; “How would you like to be remembered?” and “Have you ever been put on a CIA plane and flown to another country for torture?”), none of them, when asked “ What is your greatest fear?”, answers “Plumbing”.
Have these people never had to find a plumber at the weekend? Certainly, anyone who has will have sympathised with the recent troubles of the Conservative Party. Tories have spent months trying to find yet another new leader to fix their problems, making it five leaders in the past few years. In other words, they have endured a cycle of heartache-optimism-disillusion only too painfully familiar to any householder with domestic leaks who has hunted for someone to cure them without making the problem even worse.
Our house seems recently to have been afflicted by some kind of plumbing virus. A water cylinder sprang a pinhole leak. Later a radiator began weeping and had to be changed; then another. A bathroom water pump seized up, followed shortly by a bath tap. You soon begin to think of plumbing fixtures as trigger-happy insurgents squatting under your floorboards. You know those ticking noises that your central heating makes at night? That’s different parts of your plumbing talking to each other in plumbing’s version of Morse code. They’re saying, “Listen! The people who live here don’t know a tap washer from wasabi. We hit tonight!”.
Of course, you try to ignore each little crisis. You pretend that everything’s dandy. Your wife points out that a small puddle is pooling at the foot of the bedroom radiator. You explain, in your manly way, that it’s simply because the radiator is very hot and sweating heavily. You say this because you want to postpone the day when you have to find yet another plumber, having lost faith in the previous six you employed. This is a task that involves calling friends and having the same conversation several times over.
You: Hello, David/Jamie/Kate/Mark. We need a plumber. Do you have one that you can warmly recommend?
Your friend: (Silence).
You realise that you’re not alone in your plumbing plight because when you tap people for recommendations, they respond as if you’ve just informed them of a bereavement. When I mentioned to a friend who now lives in Bath but used to live around the corner from me that plumbing was making me weary, she responded as if to an SOS call, offering commiseration before rifling through an old address book to find the name of a reliable local plumber she had once used. “Reliable” is a technical term meaning “actually turned up”. “Reliable and presentable” means “turned up and possessed more than one tooth”.
Occasionally you even feel a frisson when someone tells you of a plumber who once did a good job. It’s the same tingle of excitement that ripples through Tory ranks each time the white smoke goes up and yet another party leader is elected. Britain may be experiencing one of those frissons right now. A sense of anticipation fills the air. Partly that’s because for eight years Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seemed like Parliament’s answer to the nation’s leaks.
Then Tony began disappearing from site to take on jobs elsewhere: most ambitiously, he tried to replumb Iraq. Behind his back, Gordon squinted at Tony’s soldering and began sucking his teeth. But we are starting to wonder if Gordon’s handiwork might be prone to dripping, too.
Now along come David Cameron and his apprentice George Osborne, smart new plumbers whose names are being whispered on the tradesmen’s grapevine. Have you heard? Apparently they haven’t been tarnished by cynicism, or succumbed yet to ramping their invoices. They’re keen, fresh-faced, still idealistic. David and George gawp at Tony’s and Gordon’s handiwork (pensions crisis; stealth taxes; dire public services) and tut-tut as they promise reassuringly to fix it all.
All Cameron has to do is turn up on time and leave the place tidy. Oh yes, and when a magazine questionnaire asks him “How would you like to be remembered”, to answer: “As the man who gave a Times columnist the name of a reliable plumber”. How hard can it be?
You are held in a happy queue
Disappointing news for the millions of us who love to spend hours being routed through telephone queueing systems, stabbing account numbers and passwords into our telephone keypads, listening to Carmina Burana and shouting “yes” into the handset while office colleagues look away awkwardly.
After setting up a website detailing tricks for short-circuiting the phone-answering systems of big US corporations to reach a human being, an American consumer activist called Paul English plans to do the same for us (www.paulenglish.com/ivr).
So why is this news disappointing? It’s because companies swear that we actually like being kept on hold for ages.
Really? Having recently spent an hour on the phone trying to cancel a bank’s credit card that I never use — a journey that took me to Malaysia, then Swansea, then London — I was assured that most customers like the convenience of dealing with computers and call centres.
The chairman of this bank had just highlighted, in a newspaper profile, how civilised yet down-to-earth he is (buys his own sandwiches from the canteen; stops to chat to office cleaners); which I’m sure is true. But is he aware that some customers are driven bananas by the bank’s practices? If he is, he should press 1. If he isn’t, press 2. To hear these options again, say “again”. Sorry, no sound was detected. Goodbye.
That's Su-Eh-Ex
At last, some joined-up thinking from the Government: introducing sex lessons for five-year-olds and bringing back phonics to teach reading. Now the Department for Education can kill two birds with one stone: “Children, repeat after me: Suh-Eh-Ex, Sex; Fuh-Or-Per-Lay, Foreplay; Puh-Reh-Guh-Na-N-Tuh, Pregnant!” But raising the smoking age to 18 — are they mad? Don’t Whitehall ministries liaise? What will these knowing five-year-olds smoke after sex? Twiglets?
