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Tomorrow I, like Paul, am doing the Work From Home bit.

The reason for this is slightly simple, yet fun, and goes like this:

As previously mentioned, our kitchen was suffering a leaky ceiling, caused by the morons above our heads abstracting their washing machine into a pile of cash. Now, as every fairy baby knows, abstractions leak, and this abstraction of appliance into affluance was not an exception. The letting agents were let in, the plumbers plumbed, the evictors were victorious, and the leak in the ceiling was sealed. Next point was to be the easy bit, the insurance bods were called, took one look at the ceiling, muttered something about “policy excess” and left. It was to be fixed, we were told. Soon. They said.

Fast Forward a little, and you hit the couple of months when I have been spending metric walletloads on working in London without yet getting a full paycheck. Rent was therefore delayed, and said Letting Agents would not let up on attempting to get their cash, and I was so busy that the ceiling slipped my mind. This was a mistake, because when we noticed it a couple of weeks ago, we realised it was now significantly worse than it had been in May. The entire ceiling was, in fact, furry where the leak had been. This was not a nice, pleasant, ‘Oooh, strokable’ type of furry, either.

No. This was a full on “there are whole civilizations living upside down on your ceiling, mate” level of green fur. A quick call to Vanderpump & Wellbelove (Our letting agents, whose name I still cannot belive) said that yes, they were aware of this problem. Yes, they had told the landlord, but the landload a) lived in the states, and b) insisted on personally approving each and every cheque, instead of letting the property letting agents be agents for his let property. I quickly jumped to the conclusion that the reason he was delaying the cheque was because my rent was late, and so operations resumed when my rent was paid.

Ready? Because here’s the fun part. This morning, LoneCat noticed that the ceiling was dripping.

Do you know what that means, boys and girls? It means that the leaky pipe is still leaking, slowly. It means that it’s leaking within the boarded up, designed to be totally inaccessible without considerable effort flat upstairs and that the people who boarded up the flat didn’t turn the water off first.

I have now carefully stored everything I care about in the kitchen (Um, which is basically pol’s router and my teabag supply. Oh, and the Lean Mean Grilling Machine which I’ll rave about sometime, it really is cool) in secure places so they probably won’t be destroyed if the ceiling collapses, and tomorrow morning I will go shout at someone to get a move on, before they have to pay us relocation benefits.

In other news, I’m looking for a new bank, and Smile seem to be a good choice. They are internet based, owned by a company that isn’t going to vanish tomorrow morning, and whilst they don’t support Mozilla fully, they do at least recognise it exists, and provide workarounds for using it, so we can see how far that goes.

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