Gas Meter, Gas Heater

First, some hoodlum stole the whole gas meter from my Tap Hall.

I know, right? Who steals a gas meter? Our theory is the thieves put it on their own pipes for everyday gas use, and when it's meter reading day, they swap back their old one and save a fortune. What could possibly go wrong with that plan? The meter-stealing-hoodlums, in true socially irresponsible form, left the gas pipe open and exposed - although they had turned the lever to the off position  - so I had to call the Office of Housing Emergency Hotline and ask them to send someone immediately to seal it off, citing the presence of lots of little children using the premises. No-one arrived till after we'd left, mind! I rang at 9ish and we were out of there at 1pm; thank you Emergency Hotline for protecting the children...

In the Hall itself, we had no heating (poor cold waiting parents), no oven (poor hungry tap teacher) and no hot water (had to boil kettles for mopping and dishes).  I was very outraged. All that discomfort and inconvenience for some bill evasion.  Anyway, without going into the nitty-gritty details, the process for replacing a Gas Meter at an Office of Housing-owned property is r-e-a-l-l-y slow, and involves an incredible amount of back-and-forth; the upshot of which is that 2 weeks later there is still no meter, or gas.  Before I had the Emergency Hotline people seal the pipe off, some rain got into the pipe and now they need a licensed plumber to pump the water out before the Gas Company can come and replace the meter.  I have suggested they put a cage over the new one.

Four days after the gas saga started at tap, I walked into my house from an evening at work and said to our babysitter I can smell gas.  Our loungeroom gas heater was leaking, and the smell took an awfully long time to go so I ended up calling my Gas Company Emergency Hotline, and their Emergency Dude (who arrived within the hour, I said there were kids on the premises) agreed there was a leak somewhere and shut off all our gas at the source.  Once more, no heating, no hot water!  However, real estate agents can move a lot faster than the Office of Housing, so we at least had a licensed plumber out the next day who confirmed that our loungeroom heater was the culprit and furthermore it was too old to be safe so he had to condemn it.  Things slowed down after that, because the Real Estate Agents then had to deal with our landlords who hate spending money on stuff, and at one point inferred that winter was pretty much over and there was no rush to replace the heater. Sigh.  But they went out and bought us a new one, and made Fixit help them pull out the condemned one, so that the plumber wouldn't charge them for that part of the job.  Then the plumber came by to make a quote, at which point we discovered quelle surprise that the original heater had not been safely installed  (I hope you didn't sit in here with the door closed, said the plumber) and the installation was going to be a bigger job than a mere gas connection, and in the ensuing communications between plumber/ real estate agents/landlords, we missed the plumber's free morning and now have to go another weekend without a loungeroom heater.  So that's been 2 weeks too.

 

Meanwhile, there is fierce competition for the warm spot in front of the kitchen heater.