Thursday, June 17, 2004

a morning of absurdity

For the last few days, we've been careful not to set the security alarm on before we leave to go to work in the morning. It was because I hadn't gotten around to giving the builder a PIN to get in the door without setting off the alarm.

Well, yesterday the builder finished building our fence (and a wonderful job it was too), and he rang to say he'd be in today to pick up the cheque.

If only I'd remembered to remind my boyfriend...

This morning, half an hour after I'd got to work, I received a call from the alarm monitoring company. Apparently someone had set the alarm off. It didn't take much brain to work out that the boy had set the alarm on before leaving the house, and the builder had triggered it off in his attempt to get in the house to retrieve his well-deserved payment. So I rang the boy, who hadn't yet arrived at work; he was pretty annoyed, but agreed to turn back and let the poor man in the house (or at least check that no-one was trying to break in).

Thirty minutes later, my brand-new mobile phone was ringing hot. It was the boy. The builder had flown, probably in panic 'cos the alarm had gone off. The boy had broken his key in the front door keyhole, possibly through brute force resulting from extreme feelings of annoyance. This is the new spare key which was only 2-weeks old. He'd managed to get the remnants out of the lock, but now had no way of locking the front door (its a deadlock) - he couldn't leave the house. He was all stressed out, with the prospect of tons to do at work and no possibility of getting to his office to do it.

There was no way around it. I would have to drive all the way back home (30 mins on the motorway and 15 mins in inner-city traffic), just to lock the front door and enable him to get to work.

Now, one round trip each day is bad enough to make me go all tight around the upper back and shoulders. Two round trips in one day, plus no lunch hour because I now had two hours to make up at work, is not a nice way to start the day.

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