Tossing Scaffolding
Something happened to make me quite miserable this morning, and then later, a wonderful reversal made me quiet happy.
Firstly, somebody rang on the door to ask me to move my van. It turned out they were taking down the scaffolding from the side of our house, which has now been there over six months (for a job which took half a day, some time over the winter - we’ve been asking to have the scaffolding removed ever since).
These same scaffolders came last week. They didn’t announce themselves, Gill just heard some noises outside the house, went out to look and there they were, taking the scaffolding down. She asked if they were going to fill the holes in our walls which they’d drilled to attach the scaffolding and was told “not our problem. That’s the builders job”. When Gill asked how the builders were supposed to get up there without any scaffolding she was told to fuck off, then the guy dropped a piece of scaffolding on the floor, making a hole in the pavement, and they left.
So today, we again asked how the holes were going to be filled, and were given the same answer and similar levels of rudeness. When I pointed out the hole in the pavement, the guy’s answer was “not my problem, it’s the council’s problem”. We came back inside, seething but not really knowing what we could do about it.
So it was really nice when, half an hour later, all of the scaffolders except for the foul-mouthed one called at our door again. This time it was to apologise for his behaviour, and to say that they had spoken to the builders who would be back with a ladder to fix the holes. They said “sorry about him, he’s a tosser, nobody likes him, but he’s the gaffer’s son so there’s not much we can do”.
Gill said “oh well, I’m sure if he carrys on that way, sooner or later he’ll have an accident”. The scaffolders smiled conspiritorially.