Nightmare

It's been the worst 24 hours since the start of the project. Friday kicked-off with the first "hit" inside the existing house and by the time the crew had packed up for the weekend, the hall looked as though it had come under attack from a flying bag of concrete dust. But the cause of the biggest headache was the total absence of the replacement gas meter. During the last few weeks, we have asked the contractor on three different occasions whether all the practical requirements had been addressed ahead of the gas re-routing. The last time was on Thursday, when a call was made to the site agent, specifically asking about the new meter.

So after the gas contractors had retrieved their expensive and useless "mole", they swiftly disconnected the old supply, on the understanding the new meter was on its way. At 3pm on Friday, there was no sign of the kit. No change at 4pm, at which time the site agent contacted the gas supplier. After a rather lengthy conversation, we were offered a new meter in one week's time. Now, this is April, so we're not running the risk of frozen pipes. However, living in a house without heating, hot water or gas for cooking is not much of an option.

To cut a long story short, the site agent managed to persuade the gas supplier to make an emergency appointment within four hours. Relief.

Four hours came and went. The upbeat start to the weekend was turned around pretty swiftly and, as it was Friday night, the site agent wasn't available on his mobile...

No choice but to take the matter into our own hands. On contacting the gas supplier, it turned out last night's emergency installation was stuck on their computerised work scheduling system. In other words, the guy managing the men in white vans, carrying those precious gas meters, didn’t know anything about the job. Again, time for some gentle, but assertive, explanation that we were NOT going to wait until Monday, let alone another week. The appointment was finally booked for Saturday morning. Great news, as we only had to endure one cold night, without hot water etc etc.

At dawn, well at 07:30am, I called the gas supplier, just to check they hadn't back-tracked on last night's promise. SURPRISE! They would not come out today, because they "don't work on Saturdays". Again, some assertive thoughts on why this wasn't an option and within a few minutes, we were back on track.

In the meantime, the sub-contracted plumber had arrived. The site agent hadn't told him the meter was still "in transit". To say he wasn't particularly enthused is probably an understatement.

Anyway, to burst this ballooning story once and for all, the meter arrived this morning at 10:00am and was installed within 20 minutes. The plumber had been on site for three hours. In the end, he didn’t do any work, but the law says you have to have an approved plumber on site, in case you have a gas leak.

We haven’t seen the end to this story. Nobody are prepared to take responsibility for the hassle we've endured in the last 24 hours. Irrespective of job scheduling systems and the treacle approach to customer service displayed by the monopoly gas meter supplier, there are some major issues regarding communication, We should not have been left to sort this issue out and somebody should have checked the specific requirements of the gas meter relocation exercise before it was too late. We'll get around to addressing these issues once we've got some heat back on the house...