Surely some mistake?
Dear Ms Asif
Surely some mistake? Didn't you mean to send this letter to Vodaphone, or Goldman Sachs?
Ah, no - my mistake: 'criminal proceedings ... we have arrested ...' - that wouldn't be million- or billion-pound tax-evaders (oops! sorry - 'avoiders') then, would it? No, that would be plumbers. Who, whatever the press claims, aren't quite in that league yet.
So, you're identifying the plumbers you'll be investigating next.
You're cross-referencing your data with trades bodies and merchants.
You're matching the materials plumbers purchase for their jobs with the work they have declared which will show up any differences.
And how much work is this taking? I mean, suppose I change a tap for Mrs Boggins: do you have an army of tax inspectors going through the sales ledgers of all the plumbers' merchants in my area matching up what they've sold me with what's on my tax return to ensure that I've declared a payment from Mrs B that matches the tap sale? (How much do tax inspectors cost these days, anyway? Not just their salaries of course but the true cost of employing them.)
And how much unpaid tax do you expect to identify, let alone recover?
(OK I guess the last two figures are much the same, even if you have to sell the plumber's house from over his head and throw his kids out on the street. I mean, it's not like he's Goldman Sachs, or Vodaphone, or anyone who matters, is he?)
Anyway I'll be extra careful from now on. Next time I crawl back late in the evening, tired and dirty from fixing the Cratchit's clapped out old boiler (costs them a fortune to run but they can't afford a newer, more efficient one) with a slim bunch of dog-eared tenners in my pocket (not half what the job's worth but you can see their family's struggling with the government's austerity measures already: jeez, what couldn't a few billion quid do to help out the poorer members of society?) I'll make absolutely sure I sit straight down and declare it in my accounts so I pay my tax on it.
Happy now?
Ups and downs
Apparently this fine installation was prone to clogging. Can't imagine why.
There's about 100mm fall to play with. Which is all used up in a drop from trap outlet level to floor level before the pipework has even got out from under the bath.
Note the compression joint mid-run: clearly a real pro job.
Cup of tea love?
Er, no thanks, I'm all right.
More compressions. And a reducer, from 40 down to 32...
Piece de resistance! 2 knuckle joints, down and back up again - and all in 32mm now!
And a nice gentle uphill incline, another knuckle - no access for cleaning, of course - and finally down into the hopper!
Note the compression joint mid-run: clearly a real pro job.
Er, no thanks, I'm all right.
And a nice gentle uphill incline, another knuckle - no access for cleaning, of course - and finally down into the hopper!
The 'B' Ark
"Oh yes," said the Captain, "... Hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants, you name them. We're going to colonize another planet."And letting agents. You'll need letting agents, or where will people stay? Take the letting agents in the 'B' Ark!
What is it with letting agents? I mean, I'm sure it's no doddle getting customers, and tenants, and vetting them, and dealing with bad ones, and that stuff. And on the maintenance side you've got to have tradespeople on board you can call on when you need them, and that's like herding cats. You've got human relations challenges: selling yourself and your services to the people who can make your business viable and profitable: Winning Friends And Influencing People.
But it also requires organisation: keeping track of what needs doing, and when, and getting it done, and in my dealings with letting agents I've generally been able to count the number who could organise a piss-up in a brewery on ... well, I've rarely needed more than my thumbs. Some have been spectacularly bad: I've had an agent ask me to do a job, been round within hours and got a long, irate rant from the tenants about the weeks they've been waiting for any action, the number of times they've called the agents and that they've eventually had to take time off from work to confront the agents at their office. Another time an agent gave me all 3 sets of keys for a property on one keyring. (What if I'd lost them - would they have paid for a locksmith or charged it to the landlord? What's your guess?) One agent (actually the same one in all these cases) even managed to put me on their internal mailing list so for months I used to get emails telling me when their next meetings were!
So it's nice, and unusual enough to savour, to deal with agents who know how many beans makes five. One local firm, which started up a few years ago, is run by a husband-and-wife couple. He's the sort of cheery, likeable guy who's friendly with everyone: a classic people person; whilst his wife comes across quieter, also friendly, calm and highly organised. Whenever a Landlord's Gas Safety inspection was due, or some repairs required, she'd let me know in good time, jolly me along cordially if needs be, and generally make sure things got sorted out without drama.
"Was", "did": past tense.
Now, for some reason (maybe more office admin work than she could handle?) she's handed over the dealing-with-maintenance side to him. And a pig's ear he's making of it. 5 months ago I did a Landlord's Gas Safety at a property they manage for a friend of mine who's living abroad these days. I noticed a set of basin taps were falling apart and reported this to Mrs Letting Agent (who was still dealing with it back then). She got onto my friend the landlord and got the go-ahead to replace them. A few weeks later (I'd been busy) Mr Letting Agent told me he'd had them done. OK, no worries, relief as I was struggling to keep up with all the jobs I had on. Early December: new tenants moved in.
Early February I get a call from landlord friend, transatlantic, asking WTF is going on at his house because the tenants are onto him complaining about it. I don't know so I email to ask the letting agents. Day or so later I get a works order from Mr Letting Agent to replace the basin taps. Yes, the ones he told me he'd had done 2 months ago. Followed by another works order to check out the central heating system losing pressure. So I went in and found - and fixed - 2 leaks from radiators, which should have sorted out the pressure problem. Few days later I went back to change the taps, and one of the tenants told me the heating system was still losing pressure so I checked around a bit and realised the boiler's built-in expansion vessel had packed up. I part-emptied one radiator to give the system water somewhere to expand into and asked them to call me about any other problems. Which they didn't do so I assumed that had fixed it, until I heard from Mr L-A that it was still losing pressure. Went back and found another problem (pressure relief valve leaking) and fixed that. That should surely fix it! Went back a couple of weeks later to fix the expansion vessel problem permanently and thought that should be the end of it.
So I was a little surprised to come home a couple of days later to an angry email from Mr L-A complaining that he'd had his ear bent by one of the tenants - who had also sent him a lengthy email which he'd copied to me - complaining that the system was still losing pressure, and other issues. Followed by an email from my landlord friend copying Mr L-A's email to him. And I was quite gobsmacked to find Mr pissup-in-brewery Letting Agent accusing me of having taken 5 months to replace the bloody taps and 3 months to not sort out the pressure problem. Which given as this was happening barely one calendar month after he'd asked me to do the work just didn't add up, time-wise.
Now I don't know if Mr L-A really believed what he wrote but he obviously didn't bother to check any of his company's own records and emails before accusing me of incompetence and/or negligence. And he seems to be implying - to the point of actually believing himself - that I'm so incompetent that I wouldn't have copies of his firm's correspondence with me or any records of what I've done to check against his allegations.
I spent more time than I care to think about over that weekend and the following days writing emails and in long discussions on the phone with Mr Landlord (he called me: I think he's set up for cheap transatlantic phone calls to his family back here - it would have cost me about £100 on my call tariff to have made the calls from my end!). At the end of which I now have nothing but stress to show for it. Mr Letting Agent didn't even have the decency to acknowledge my emails, let alone apologise for the blatant bollocks he wrote about me.
From the accusations that I'd taken 3 months over the pressure-drop problem, and from what my Landlord friend told me about the tenants complaining to him since they moved in, I'd guess they had been reporting problems to the agents from day one but that it was only 2 months later that Mr L-A had stirred himself to do anything about it (and that only after I had emailed them to ask what was going on there!).
So from now on I'll avoid taking on any new work from these jokers. I'm sure they can find someone else: after all the South-East is just crawling with plumbers falling over each other for work.
And if you're looking for a letting agent let me tell you about those I know about ...
By the way, Dale Carnegie's classic "How To Win Friends And Influence People" is still worth a read today.
Especially if you're a shit-for-brains Letting Agent.
Running off the leash
Since being made to re-apply for their job of running the register (the 'R' in their name) of gas installers - and losing it (to CRAPITA, who so far have managed not to f**k it up) - CORGI have obviously had to reappraise their business model: instead of pulling in a steady income of registration fees from a captive market of folks like me, they now have to actually go out and earn a living.
Before they lost the registration job they were already selling van and liability insurance and running Competent Persons schemes in electrics as well as plumbing and ventilation, and sold sundries like Landlord's Gas Safety record pads. This is potentially good stuff: the folks at CORGI ought to have a better idea what their former members require in the way of, say, insurance than even the 'specialist' insurance companies who deal with a range of trades, and be able to arrange more appropriate cover at better prices. And sure enough they gave me the best deal on Professional Indemnity/Public Liability insurance when I had to renew it last year.
They also run a direct marketing operation corgi-direct.com which regularly sends me emails which always sound as if they're rather pathetically desperately trying to drum-up business, offering stuff I never want to buy at the prices they're asking. Today's was a classic: not only entirely tangential but illiterate to boot:
It's a disappointing waste of effort: taking a look at their website while writing this post I saw that they actually have some useful-looking stuff at not totally OTT prices, but they don't present it very well. In particular they have publications and stationery which you really need to see something of to tell if they're worthwhile, but the site gives only minimal descriptions and pictures of the covers of the books and images of forms at too low resolution to see what you're getting.
Now, for no apparent reason, they've started badge-engineering not-particularly-exciting items like central heating thermostats sold through Toolstation.
Why? This - and the other CORGI badged items - aren't particularly exotic, or cheap, or anything. And I can't imagine many of my customers wanting a CORGI logo on the thermostat in their living room so I'll buy plain ones by preference.
But the icing on the, er, bottom of the barrel has to be this:
For years every time any of us installed a boiler we have had to notify it to the local council under Building Regulations. We could do this directly via Councils' Building Control offices but it's an expensive bureaucratic palaver, and CORGI, when they ran the installers' register, had a scheme (now run by their successor Gas Safe Register) that lets us notify installations to them, online or by phone for a few quid, and they notify the LA. So, over the years CORGI have acquired a database of names and addresses of people and the makes and models of boilers they've had installed and when they were done, and now they're using this to tout for the business of our erstwhile customers to sell them service contracts!
When CORGI lost their job to CAPITA the deal was that the latter would have the job for 10 years at the most, after which it would be up for grabs again. I daresay when that time comes around CORGI may be making another bid for it. It would of course be a cruel irony if their behaviour in the interim were a factor militating against their chances of success.
Before they lost the registration job they were already selling van and liability insurance and running Competent Persons schemes in electrics as well as plumbing and ventilation, and sold sundries like Landlord's Gas Safety record pads. This is potentially good stuff: the folks at CORGI ought to have a better idea what their former members require in the way of, say, insurance than even the 'specialist' insurance companies who deal with a range of trades, and be able to arrange more appropriate cover at better prices. And sure enough they gave me the best deal on Professional Indemnity/Public Liability insurance when I had to renew it last year.
They also run a direct marketing operation corgi-direct.com which regularly sends me emails which always sound as if they're rather pathetically desperately trying to drum-up business, offering stuff I never want to buy at the prices they're asking. Today's was a classic: not only entirely tangential but illiterate to boot:
It's a disappointing waste of effort: taking a look at their website while writing this post I saw that they actually have some useful-looking stuff at not totally OTT prices, but they don't present it very well. In particular they have publications and stationery which you really need to see something of to tell if they're worthwhile, but the site gives only minimal descriptions and pictures of the covers of the books and images of forms at too low resolution to see what you're getting.
Now, for no apparent reason, they've started badge-engineering not-particularly-exciting items like central heating thermostats sold through Toolstation.
Why? This - and the other CORGI badged items - aren't particularly exotic, or cheap, or anything. And I can't imagine many of my customers wanting a CORGI logo on the thermostat in their living room so I'll buy plain ones by preference.
But the icing on the, er, bottom of the barrel has to be this:
When CORGI lost their job to CAPITA the deal was that the latter would have the job for 10 years at the most, after which it would be up for grabs again. I daresay when that time comes around CORGI may be making another bid for it. It would of course be a cruel irony if their behaviour in the interim were a factor militating against their chances of success.
Fry-up
Impressive. I guess there was some muck on the PCB which got some tracking going between connections with mains between them and when the board got hot enough to char it allowed more current to pass, more heat, more charring, until it popped the fuse. Stunk the place out.
Recommendation
One of the nice things about working for yourself is that when you work for people you like the people they recommend you to also tend to be people you get on with, whereas the arseholes[1] you wish you'd stayed clear of in the first place don't pass you on to other arseholes.
"Tend to", note. In general. Not always.
A pleasant couple I've done a few bits of work for over the years asked me to call up a neighbour of theirs who was having trouble with her boiler. This was on a Saturday. On the phone the neighbour volunteered that it was "A Potterton" in that way that you just know they think they're pretty clued up not only to be able to tell a boiler from a hole in the ground but to give you that much information on it, and any attempt to get them to further identify it and maybe even press an overheat reset button or suchlike is going to be about as profitable as trying to pin a politician down to an election manifesto commitment. Since it was pretty Arctic at the time and I was already booked up for Monday I offered to go round on the Sunday to look at it. Spent about half an hour taking covers off and testing bits to verify what the problem seemed to be and what it would need to fix it and told her. At this point she mentions that By The Way she's already got an engineer coming round the next morning to see to it.
What the ....?!!!
I suppose I should have charged her an arm and a leg for my time but I didn't even do that. They'll throw me out of the Federation of Rogue Traders if they find out. To be honest I just wanted out of there. I mean it wasn't just that the boiler was down in the basement (a big basement which seemed to go on round twists and turns forever) and she had a touch of the Kathy Bates about her; she even asked as I was leaving if I was married, and wanted to get married again. I was glad to be out in the fresh air ...
And then a couple of days later she phones up - in the middle of the evening - to complain that the other installer fitted a new programmer and she can't work out how to use it. Er, aren't there instructions for it? Yes but because she's so exceptionally intelligent (at this point I lost track of how her family had conspired against her because of her near-genius level of intellect to deny her the education she needed, or something) ... well for some reason she couldn't work the thing and the guy who'd fitted it, his mobile was switched off, I can't imagine why. I don't know if she expected me to leap into my RogueMobile and go over and sort it out for her (probably for free) that instant if not sooner, but I did manage to convey that that wasn't going to happen, and lose her. For now at least.
Now how do you block numbers on this phone?
[1] It's not really fair to compare these sorts of people with the part of the body concerned with defecatory functions. An arsehole may not be everybody's idea of a pleasant organ but it does at least perform a useful function.
"Tend to", note. In general. Not always.
A pleasant couple I've done a few bits of work for over the years asked me to call up a neighbour of theirs who was having trouble with her boiler. This was on a Saturday. On the phone the neighbour volunteered that it was "A Potterton" in that way that you just know they think they're pretty clued up not only to be able to tell a boiler from a hole in the ground but to give you that much information on it, and any attempt to get them to further identify it and maybe even press an overheat reset button or suchlike is going to be about as profitable as trying to pin a politician down to an election manifesto commitment. Since it was pretty Arctic at the time and I was already booked up for Monday I offered to go round on the Sunday to look at it. Spent about half an hour taking covers off and testing bits to verify what the problem seemed to be and what it would need to fix it and told her. At this point she mentions that By The Way she's already got an engineer coming round the next morning to see to it.
What the ....?!!!
I suppose I should have charged her an arm and a leg for my time but I didn't even do that. They'll throw me out of the Federation of Rogue Traders if they find out. To be honest I just wanted out of there. I mean it wasn't just that the boiler was down in the basement (a big basement which seemed to go on round twists and turns forever) and she had a touch of the Kathy Bates about her; she even asked as I was leaving if I was married, and wanted to get married again. I was glad to be out in the fresh air ...
And then a couple of days later she phones up - in the middle of the evening - to complain that the other installer fitted a new programmer and she can't work out how to use it. Er, aren't there instructions for it? Yes but because she's so exceptionally intelligent (at this point I lost track of how her family had conspired against her because of her near-genius level of intellect to deny her the education she needed, or something) ... well for some reason she couldn't work the thing and the guy who'd fitted it, his mobile was switched off, I can't imagine why. I don't know if she expected me to leap into my RogueMobile and go over and sort it out for her (probably for free) that instant if not sooner, but I did manage to convey that that wasn't going to happen, and lose her. For now at least.
Now how do you block numbers on this phone?
[1] It's not really fair to compare these sorts of people with the part of the body concerned with defecatory functions. An arsehole may not be everybody's idea of a pleasant organ but it does at least perform a useful function.
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