Waterworld

Well the printer is working. I ramdomly pressed a button and a whirling took place and what was meant to happen but hadn't up 'til then did. There we are up and printing...not that I've anything to print but I did a sample page and it was stunning.

With this printer you print from within the application. Sounds good doesn't it. No idea what it means but it's all the rage. Anyway I tried a sample print -and it worked. I had been on the edge of my seat for the last week over this printer thing. You know how it is: do I phone up John Lewis and insist they take it back or do I acknowledge that I might not have got the set up quite right.

I blame it on the instructions: they just weren't clear enough. There ought to be instructions for everyone and separate instructions for the over '60's. Large easy to read icons; pictures of people like me fumbling with a keyboard and a help line to Age UK. When a PPI person called I engaged them in a 10 minute conversation on how to get my printer working. I hear that subsequently our phone number's been deleted from all telesales databases.

Fixing our printer had reduced the week's angst factor by 50%. However there remained the dripping tap.

2 years ago, as regular readers will recall, we refurbished our kitchen - more Homebase than Smallbone. We had our tap replaced- with a Franke... to go with our overpriced Franke sink. The Franke tap wasn't cheap and being German I thought it would last until the next outbreak of war.

2 months ago it started to leak. Not seriously to begin with, but after a while I texted our friendly plumber, a Project Manager for Transport for London, who has a thing about s bends and plungers. As she was on holiday she wasn't available until the end of June when on her return she'd get in touch. She didn't, but as the dripping tap wasn't a problem I left it.

The tap drip got worse. Rubber bands initially stopped it. Rubber bands doubled were required after a time. The drip became a torrent, but I realised that the extremely strong rubber straps we used for securing our trees might be the solution. They were for a while. We were then forced to use Duct tape along with the rubber straps.

This was getting serious and I texted our plumber. She replied. Having dropped her phone in a loo on a job, she'd lost her texts and had no record of my earlier one, but knew there was a request out there. Anyway, she came around. I took a photo of the tap and she contacted Franke UK, a small outfit in the wilds of West Sussex.

Things went down hill rapidly. The only way to stop a Niagara Falls was to physically press against the tap. Magical incantations sometimes worked. The missus hit on turning the mains off and then slowly turning it on again until the point where the water ran but the tap didn't leak. In the end at night, and when we were out of the house, we turned off the water and the boiler, just in case.

It was hell. You'd go to the loo at night, flush the toilet, and go down stairs to turn the water on to fill the loo so that it wasn't empty should we use it again.

Anyway, yesterday our plumber texted saying the part from Franke had arrived and she'd be around today, Saturday, to fix our tap.

Never has a plumber been so welcomed. We went out and bought biscuits especially for her. Nothing was too much for her. A range of teas and coffees,  a comfortable chair to relax in between the arduous process of replacing our ceramic valve. In less than an hour we were drip less and over the moon.

Franke even supplied the replacement part cost free as it had failed so soon after being fitted.

I am a man reborn. Not only is our expensive printer working but our tap is not driving us insane.

The world might be ending, financial melt down is imminent, and social breakdown is just around the corner, but do I care. Well, I will now that local domestics have been sorted.