‘Red Robbo’ and the draindoon: My plumbing, continued

Regular readers of this blog will know that we’ve had a problem with our boiler.  After 53 days without hot water or heating the problem was finally fixed.  It’s not my intention to name the companies involved.  The Chief Executive of our service home plan company assured me personally that he will review the circumstances that led to our situation, and make changes to procedures where applicable.  I’m happy with that.  I’ve named and shamed on a couple of occasions in the past with respect to completely different issues, but I don’t think that would achieve anything more in this case, and many of our delays were actually caused by the sub-contracted boiler manufacturer.

So I can now write about some of the more ridiculous elements in what we’ve experienced, and you can hopefully enjoy them, without this post being a tirade.

It all started when our boiler needed it’s annual service as part of one of those home plan service agreement things.  The service engineer found a fault with the boiler which he could not fix there and then, and stuck a ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker on the boiler.

I asked him what would happen next, and he said that the home plan people would be in touch with us to arrange for someone to come and do the work to (I think it was) the heat exchanger.

After he left, my wife and I got out our contract with the home plan.  It was very reassuring.  We now knew that we were covered, we need not worry, that they were there to help us, that there was a network of 5,000 engineers available, and that they were on hand to keep our home safe and warm.

There were delays, but eventually two more heating engineers turned up.

The second and third heating engineers said that they couldn’t fix the boiler, but recommended that the manufacturers, who would have all the spare parts, would be able to do so.

A couple of days later the home plan people phoned up to say that they were having trouble arranging for a heating engineer from the manufacturers to come and fix our boiler, as that company was very busy and their heating engineer was on holiday.  They would call us back, but wanted to know if the heating engineer would need a ladder to access the boiler, and also if there was parking outside our house.  I told them that no ladder was needed, and that there was usually parking available somewhere near the house.  They asked a second time to confirm that a ladder would not be needed, which I thought was a bit strange.  Later on I thought about this and reckoned that for health and safety reasons the manufacturer’s heating engineer probably could not go up a ladder.  Well, I thought, that would not be a problem, as our boiler was on a wall only a few feet high.

A fourth engineer, from the manufacturers, turned up eventually.  He had originally been booked for the previous week, two weeks after the third and fourth engineers had called, those two week delays having been caused, as I said, by the fourth engineer having been on holiday, but they phoned us in the meantime to say that he’d gone off sick, hence the extra week’s delay.

I’ll refer to the fourth engineer as ‘Red Robbo‘ for reasons that will become obvious to older readers of this blog.  It became clear, eventually, that Red Robbo was far more interested in finding reasons for not doing the repair rather than actually doing the work.  Like my friend Fat Mac, he seemed a bit of a throwback to the 1970s, when nothing ever got done for one reason or another

“Kudni git pairkt” Red Robbo complained vociferously, as he came in the front door.  Red Robbo was a man of few words, and every one of them was delivered with a Scottish accent so thick that even I had problems understanding what he said.

I showed him into the kitchen, opened the cabinet door, and he looked at the boiler.

“Hiznae been install correk” he announced, gruffly.  I felt it better not to follow that one up, but merely pointed out that it had been going strong (until recently) for some time.

“Whaurs yer draindoon?” Red Robbo enquired.

“Where’s my what?”

“Uzzara draindoon, ferra wa’ah tae drain frae?”

“I don’t really know.  Where is it likely to be?”

“Kudbi doonstair”

He then accompanied me downstairs, where there is one radiator, which he vaguely glanced at, and then announced,

“Uzz kawney c wanz”*

We went back up to the kitchen, where he had yet another look at the boiler.  He got out a sticker with ‘Danger, do not use’ written on it in large letters, and stuck it next to the sticker saying ‘Danger, do not use’ that the first service engineer had stuck on it, weeks previously.

Then he closed the cabinet door, turned to me and announced,

“Utz unna cubinet”

“Yes” I answered, “It’s in a cabinet.  The cabinet was put there just after the boiler was installed, some time ago.  Is that an issue?”

“Uzzcunna fux ut uffitz unna cubinet.  Yeil hivtae hiv the cubinet takken aff.”

“You can’t take the cabinet off the wall?” I asked, with some trepidation.

Red Robbo looked askance, stuck out his chest for a second, and then said the following three words in perfectly understandable English.

“Health and safety”

My heart sank.  Everyone in the UK knows the extreme finality of those three words and the utter futility of questioning them.

“Yuzzll needa jyner tak it aff” Red Robbo added, helpfully.

For a moment I thought about showing solidarity with Red Robbo and saying to him, in his own parlance, “Ufyeez gieuz a haun-up, Ukin mebbie tak if aff masel”, but I suspected that this would not solve everything, and that he probably still had some additional dry powder in reserve preventing a successful conclusion to our boiler problem, so instead I said,

“Oh!  Health and safety.  Well, I’m pretty sure that my wife and I could probably manage to dismantle the cabinet.  Anything else?”

“Yuzz needa draindoon.  Orgerra plumma tae find wan”

“Erm” I hesitated, “Are you not a plumber?”

You should have seen the look he gave me when he answered, “Umma heet’n enjuneer.  Snay ma jobe tae fuxa draindoon.  Ratzferra plumma.”

So, more than a month after the first service chap had stuck his ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker on the boiler, and with now two ‘Danger, do not use’ stickers on the boiler, and with the help of the fourth heating engineer to visit the premises, the progress made consisted of a discovery that the boiler was in a kitchen cabinet, and that the whereabouts of the drain down was unknown.  And all that time we’d been without heating or hot water.

Before Red Robbo left, he gave my wife a piece of paper to sign.  A signature was needed on a form to show that we had read, and understood, the second ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker that he’d just stuck on the boiler.  The form was in semi-legal jargonese, and much more difficult to understand than a ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker, which I reckon is fairly self-explanatory.  Then he asked her to sign his handheld mini-computery-looking thing, using a fingernail signature.

“What are you signing?” I asked, because the screen she was looking at had no writing on it whatsoever.  Red Robbo explained, “Sjuz summat tae say at Uv bin here.” Then he left.

I decided to phone the home plan people and tell them that we were not impressed with the service we had received so far, and that our boiler was still not working.  The home plan girl didn’t seem very helpful this time, and I was getting nowhere, and it was at that point that I made what may have been a mistake – I said that I’d like to make a complaint.  The girl immediately passed me on to someone I shall call Suzie (not her real name), who explained that she was now our complaints manager.  She was very reassuring.  I went through our situation, and said that it was simply not acceptable.  She agreed, and said that she had registered our complaint.  I then asked Suzie what would happen next.

Suzie explained that our complaint would be investigated.

This meant that we would receive a letter in the post within three working days acknowledging our complaint, and that every endeavour would be made to resolve our complaint within two weeks, but that the process might take six weeks, and she added something about an Ombudsman being available as a last resort.  It seemed to me that perhaps effort was now going into investigating the complaint, rather than fixing the boiler, but that’s just MHO.

My wife and I went on a short break to an Airbnb where there was a shower, and waited for the letter.  Before we left the house, we looked up ‘central heating drain down’ on Google, and immediately found a picture of a drain down.  Knowing what we were now looking for, we went downstairs, looked at the bottom of the radiator, and saw a drain down!

When we came back from the short break, it took us ten minutes to take the cabinet down from the wall.  The boiler was now completely accessible.

Cabinet off the wall

So the phone goes, and it’s our complaints manager, Suzie.

“Is Mrs MacLeod there please?”

“I’m afraid she’s out.  Can I help?  I’m Mr MacLeod.”

“Its Suzie here, from your home plan.  I’m afraid I can only talk to Mrs MacLeod, the account owner, for security reasons.”

“Hi Suzie, we spoke the other day.  Suzie, Mrs MacLeod is at the swimming pool.  This is the only way we’ve been able to have a shower now for seven weeks.  What security reasons have you got for not telling me when our boiler will be repaired?”

“I’m very sorry, Mr MacLeod.  I’ve left a message on Mrs MacLeod’s mobile phone.”

I was annoyed, but didn’t say any more.  When my wife returned from the swimming pool she phoned Suzie, who said she’d had terrible trouble getting the boiler manufacturers on the phone but had eventually got through to them, and had been told that they couldn’t send an engineer for another week.

I’d had enough.  It was now 49 days since the first ‘Danger, do not use’ sticker had been stuck on our boiler.  I couldn’t stand the thought of Red Robbo going off on extended sick leave and then eventually pitching up sometime in the new year only to drive off again because he couldn’t get parked.

I did a little research and contacted the service home plan company’s chief executive by email.  I explained that we were about to have visitors to our house, our elder son was arriving back from Ethiopia in four days with his girlfriend from Kenya.  I explained some of the history of our situation, and that our guests from Africa would soon arrive.  How bad would it be, I explained, if we were not able to offer either of them a shower, and that being used to the heat of the African sun they’d have to huddle together in front of our small blowy electric fire for warmth.  What would his girlfriend think if this was an example of Scottish hospitality?

This did the trick.  The company phoned up and said they were pulling out all the stops to get an engineer to us on the Monday, together with all the spare parts needed to repair the boiler. I was to contact the chief executive personally if the job didn’t get done on Monday.

My wife and I suddenly went all giggly at the prospect of being able to shower, without going to Porty swimming pool, within three days, and we also thought about how warm we would make our house for our returning son.

So anyway, it was the fifth heating engineer who finally fixed the boiler.  Like a good engineer, he followed the problem back to it’s source.  It wasn’t anything that the first, second, third or fourth engineers had said needed replacing.  It didn’t need access to the ‘draindoon’, and it didn’t look as if the cabinet needed to have come off the wall.  It was a £5 gasket that was needed, which he happened to have in his van.  Thankyou Andrew, the heating engineer.

Now I’m going to have a hot bath.

* Translation: “A drain down is not visible to me”

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My plumbing

One time, more than twenty years ago, I had to call out an emergency plumber.  I can’t remember what it cost (it seemed a lot at the time), but nowadays to call out an emergency plumber the cost is likely to be above £60.  You only call an emergency plumber if, well, it’s an emergency.  A slow drip is not really an emergency.  A trickle or a spray could well be an emergency, and a gush even more so.  I had a trickle/spray caused by me putting a small nail through a pipe (don’t ask).  And, of course, it was the weekend when I’d been doing some home repairs/damage.

So, there was a trickle/spray coming from the pipe.  I’d tied some cloth around the pipe, and this had downgraded the emergency somewhat, but I called the plumber anyway.

I can’t remember for sure, but maybe the company was called ‘Pure Plumbing’ or something similar.

So the emergency plumbers pitched up, and I showed them the pipe, undid the cloth, and there for all to see was the trickle/spray of water coming out of the pipe.

Without further ado, the plumber took a hammer from his belt of tools and hit the pipe, once, at the point from where the offending trickle/spray was emerging.  The trickle/spray immediately ceased.

I was dumfounded.  I looked at the plumber.  He looked back at me, and said ‘lead pipe’.

For goodness sake, I thought to myself, I’ve had to cough up £60 for someone to come and hit my lead pipe with a hammer once.  Why didn’t I think of that?

The plumber obviously thought he was onto a winner.  Not only was this probably the most money he’d ever earned for the least imparted effort, but there could be more where that was coming from, so he promptly suggested that he could rip up most of my floorboards and replace all of my lead piping for only several hundred more pounds.  I’ll give him that it was worth a try, but we put it off until we’d applied for a grant for replacing lead pipes.

I don’t have a great record when it comes to plumbing, but that record is much better than when it comes to electrics, which I do not understand at all, at all.  I’ve connected at least one washing machine in my time, and only had one resulting complaint from them downstairs.

A while back, well about five years ago, we had a plumbing chap in to service the boiler and central heating.  For this we pay an annual amount, and having the annual servicing was very reassuring.  The plumber told us that we had a problem, which was almost certainly that we needed a new pump.  So I contacted the service agreement people and said that we needed a new pump, which was covered by the service agreement.  There was then quite a bit of toing and froing with the service agreement company, who suggested that we should get a power flush of all of our radiators first, at our own expense (because power flushes are not covered by the service agreement).  I remember questioning the service agreement company about the need for a power flush when their own service plumber had said that we needed a new pump.  Anyway, to cut a long story short, the company eventually agreed to install a new pump, which solved the problem.

Around the same time, by coincidence, my friend Fat Mac had been advised to power flush his own central heating system by his own service agreement company, but being a stingy so-and-so he’d decided instead to do without any heating whatsoever for six months and attempt to raise his own inner heat through prolonged and extreme meditation (I’m not kidding you – this is the truth) and in addition solve his plumbing issue through the power of prayer.

As an aside, and in Fat Mac’s defense, this connection between plumbing and prayer is not uncommon, IMHO.  My son Jamie was living in Accra, Ghana, renting a house, and he had a problem with the water tank which meant that the shower often reduced to a dribble (not even a trickle).  So Jamie called the landlord.  The landlord responded quickly, and pitched up to the house.  Jamie showed him the dribble of water coming from the shower head.  His landlord went through to where the water tank was situated, called Jamie though, with his left hand he took Jamie’s hand, and then he placed his right hand on the water tank, then he said: “let us pray”.  Then the landlord left.

All of this played around my head for a while, and with a medium amount of artistic license and exaggeration, I facetiously wrote to The Sunday Times agony aunt Mrs Mills ‘seeking’ a solution.  Below is my letter, and her response (read the bit under ‘Flushed Away’):

Which brings me to my latest plumbing issue.  It’s now mid-to-late October, and our boiler hasn’t been working since the end of August.  We’ve had no heating or hot water since 31st August.  We have a service agreement, which may, or may not, be with the same company as in the past (my wife deals with that).  So, since the beginning of September we’ve been going to the Porty swimming pool most days, for a shower and a swim.

I’ve never swam so much in my life!  We’ve also, as regular readers of this blog will know, been on a couple of breaks to places where they have showers/baths.

Yet, still, the issue with our boiler continues.  It’s now a complaint with the service agreement people.

As the complaint has not been resolved at the time of writing, I can’t give more details, here.  So, this post is…to be continued.

Over on the west coast

Due to the fact that our boiler has still not been fixed (long, boring story), and we haven’t had heating or hot water for 6 weeks, I’ve been swimming in the Porty pool most days.  There’s only a certain amount of swimming one can do, so to get a nice shower somewhere else we went over to the west coast for a couple of nights and stayed in an Airbnb.  Our first experience of Airbnb, and very nice it was, too.

On the way over, we stopped briefly at Loch Lubnaig, which had overflowed a bit with all the recent rain.

Loch Lubnaig

Next stop was Connel Bridge, where some brave souls were kayaking in the white water.  Hopefully, you can see them if you look closely at the above photo.

The bridge over the Atlantic

Further west we crossed what is known rather grandly as the bridge over the Atlantic, onto Seil Island.  The bridge spans seawater, which makes Seil an island, and what a lovely island it is.

View looking south-west, from near the bridge

Beinn Lora

We enjoyed a couple of nights at North Ledaig Caravan Park, with lovely views over to Mull.  From the campsite, in the distance you can watch the Oban to Craignure ferry.

Behind Benderloch there’s an excellent track towards Beinn Lora (308m), though the track eventually stops, and the path to the top can get quite boggy.  Just to the right of the house in the centre of the photo above is the site of a Pictish fort, known as Beregonium.  It did not seem to be accessible.

For a mountain of only 308m, Beinn Lora provides fantastic views in all directions, over to Mull, the Firth or Lorne, and Loch Creran.

Tickled pink about a new publication

I’m tickled pink about a new article I contributed to, which has just been published by the UKSG (United Kingdom Serials Group).  I’m the second-named author, which means that Hayley Gibson, the first author, did more of the writing work, but I’m pleased that almost nine years after retiring I can still contribute to publications.

The article has been published as an editorial in UKSG eNews, which is read by people involved with scholarly journal publishing.  Scholarly journal publishing is an important part of the overall scholarly publishing industry.

When you think about it, a great deal of time, effort and $billions is spent on research worldwide every year; research into medicine, engineering, science, the social sciences, arts and humanities and so on.  The results of such research is mainly published as articles in scholarly journals – articles on everything from malaria prevention, earthquake studies, global warming and water resources, right through to advances in batteries, food processing, nutrition, buffaloes, rabbits and even essential oils.

Researchers, academics, students and sometimes the general public read these articles and often incorporate the published research results into further research, and all of this, hopefully, eventually benefits our society.

More than 2.5 million scientific articles are published each year, and it is very important that such articles are visible and discoverable to anyone who wants to read and use them.  There are many tools to assist in this discoverability – just ask any academic librarian to name them.  Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic are two of the largest, and many more are mentioned in this Wiki List of academic databases and search engines.

Most of those tools try to index either as many publications as possible, or publications in particular subject areas, and most cover articles going way back.

Of all of the many millions of articles which have been published over the years, perhaps the cream on the publishing cake includes the most recent articles.  This is one reason why I am involved with JournalTOCs, a free service which assists researchers and others to keep up-to-date with the most recent articles published in nearly 32,000 different scholarly journals produced by more than 3,200 different publishers, large and small.

Now then, there are basically three different publishing models for journals.  There are journals which are subscription-based, journals which are available on Open Access, and there are hybrid journals.

The articles in subscription-based journals are behind paywalls and can be read only by those who subscribe, or by those in institutions that subscribe (and make access available to their members, normally through their libraries) – the publishers of those journals cover their costs through the subscriptions.

The articles published in Open Access journals are freely available to read by anyone – the publishers of those journals cover their costs mainly through Article Processing Charges (APCs) paid (mostly) by the authors or their institutions or research funders.

Hybrid journals are those which are essentially subscription-based, but which also include some Open Access (freely available to read) articles – the publishers of hybrid journals cover some of their costs through subscriptions, and some through APCs.

In recent times, the number of Open Access journals has increased, and so has the number of hybrid journals.

So far, so good.  If an institution subscribes to a subscription-based or hybrid journal, then the contents of that journal, whether behind a paywall or those previously mentioned Open Access articles in hybrid journals, will be easily available to members of the institution in question, usually through being found via the institution’s discovery tool(s).  Open Access articles in hybrid journals to which an institution does not subscribe, however, may well not be accessible through the institutions discovery tool(s).  Open Access articles in hybrid journals won’t be included in discovery tools (academic databases and search engines) which only index Open Access journals.  Some freely available discovery tools may not include Open Access articles in hybrid journals.

Those pesky Open Access articles in hybrid journals may not appear in all sorts of places where people look for articles, because they are not easy to identify as freely available, amongst all the subscription-based stuff behind paywalls in the same journals.  The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) looked at all of this and came up with some recommendations for what they called ‘article-level descriptors in machine-readable form’ which would have assisted the automated identification of Open Access articles in hybrid journals, in the knowlede that if there’s an automated way of identifying such articles then many things can follow to assist in the visability of those articles in discovery tools and elsewhere, but there were various issues that hampered the take-up of their recommendations.

The article that Hayley Gibson and myself wrote recently addresses some of the above, and then shows how JournalTOCs has provided an alternative, pretty simple, way for the automated identification and discoverability of Open Access articles in hybrid journals.

The way it works in practise is demonstrated in the graphic above.  Third World Quarterly is a hybrid journal published by Taylor & Francis.  It is one of more than 12,000 hybrid journals currently being published by various publishers.  Some of the articles in Third World Quarterly are behind a paywall, and some are available on Open Access.  JournalTOCs has identified those Open Access articles as shown in the above graphic.  If you go to the Taylor & Francis website for the journal, for example here where the contents of Vol 39 Issue 6 are listed, you can see that some articles have the Open Access icon and some don’t.  Taylor & Francis know which of their articles are Open Access, but how can discovery tools, databases, search engines and aggregators identify, like JournalTOCs has done, those articles as Open Access in an automated way?  The answer is explained in The importance of cc:license for the discoverability of open access articles in hybrid journals, by Hayley Gibson and myself.