I have this picture in my mind of an earnest man doing his job seriously, entirely and blissfully unaware of the comedy he is perpetrating. I wouldn’t say that this impression is based on the lone sighting I had of this man as he was leaving after his first visit to attend to our gas problems (a little clarification of this last phrase is perhaps necessary and definitely forthcoming). Unshaven and dressed with an informality heavily weighted on the casual, dishevelled side, my first take as he sped away in his Vulcangas van was that we had disturbed an otherwise relaxing workday for him.
My cynical and clearly erroneous impression was corrected later by Maria’s report of his visit. He had proudly shown her where he had fixed the gas leak in the tube leading from the tank buried in the ground. It looked as if an infant had been playing there with silly putty. But hey, who am I that knows little of these technical gas things. After all, in response to Maria’s question whether the tank’s gas gauge read in liters or percent, he had replaced the gauge … with one that had the last 20% highlighted in red, “as a reminder for us to refill the tank when it reached this level.” Phew, glad he did that – I would hate to be surprised by an empty gas tank just because the gauge read 0%.
Helpful guy – fixed the leak, gave the ignorant stranieri an aid to improve their gas habits. No doubt he was very satisfied with himself on a job well done.
So I go and check his work. Open up the tank lid, and get assaulted by a release of trapped gas that made me feel instantly light-headed. The leak was worse by several degrees than it was before – no technical gizmos required, just an average nose.
It was hard to get close to read the now red-banded gauge, but, being the fastidious type, I did. There it was, nestling comfortably at the end of its red zone – 0%. The day before, prior to his “service” call, the old gauge had read 10%. Which means that in the space of a day we had used nearly 200 liters of gas, and we shouldn’t have had any hot water (which wasn’t the case, given the hot showers that were still freely available).
Hmmm – so this “technician” comes to fix a problem, leaves it worse than before, and with fewer aids to monitor our gas situation. Ever open-minded, I look upon this as a new twist on the concept of “aid”, perhaps viewed from a perspective other than mine (the alleged customer).
So Maria calls Simone, a contractor who does “customer service” on behalf of the gas company. He immediately says he’ll take care of it. Having met Simone before and failed to help him understand a different issue we were having (despite several different approaches to the subject by both Maria and me), his confident assertion left me strangely without even the slightest hint of comfort.
Eventually the gas man returned in response to our obvious emergency (according to his red-zone gauge) … 3 days later. Neither of us saw him, but he must have been there, since the leak has been repaired. It now looks as if he brought another of his infant children with him to perform silly putty artwork on the gas pipes.
The gas gauge? Uh-huh – 0%. I wonder what’s making the water hot. Maybe it needs a different technician to fix that problem. Or perhaps he just forgot. After all, he’s already done us enough favours, coming out here twice and all. We wouldn’t want to take advantage of him.
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