“Fucking Assholes!” said the electrician. This was the pinnacle of his profanity, but he’d been working up to it as he got steadily more incredulous over the last ten minutes.
Welcome to the latest episode in the continuing story of my bathroom. The electricity to the shower was reconnected this week so the plasterer can come in and try and make the place look less like a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
It’s taken a while to sort out the mess left by the previous guys — the second lot I got in and then fired after three days as they were useless. There were a few wires lying around which the electrician had assumed were just old wires. I suspected they were in fact the main wires for the shower and the lights, and so he tested them.
“Well, it’s very live,” said the electrician, looking somewhat surprised.
“Is that bad?” I asked, wondering if something could be ‘very’ live and if it was in someway worse than normally live.
“Well I wouldn’t touch it,” he advised.
Well quite, fortunately I’ve been avoiding the dangerous looking cable for the last few weeks as it flapped it’s exposed connections around about eye level. In fact I tucked it behind a convenient pipe, which may have been less wise than I originally thought.
Suddenly it occurred to me what had happened, because the roof has been raised a few feet the last lot cut the wires to take down the roof and left them one end dangling, the other must be behind the roof. The electrician said they wouldn’t have done that, but I explained that they were a bit of a dubious lot and so he looked for the other end of the wires and discovered them lurking behind a roof panel.
So the last lot had just killed the power, snipped the wires disconnecting the earth to the pipes and then turned the power back on leaving the live lights and shower wires hanging out of the wall.
Finally convinced beyond doubt that they’d really done that the electrician completed his stream of profanities by pronouncing them “Fucking Assholes.”
“They were cowboys, that’s why I binned them,” I said.
“You just don’t do that though. It’s really dangerous, in the bathroom with all the water, you could have been frazzled …”
Eeek.
It’s all fixed now, just the plastering, tiling, and painting to go.