Gentlemen, I am old enough to not irritate (much) unless I wish to, but often the incompetence is so gross that a blind man with a straitjacket on would be hard pressed to miss it. A brief example. I took a car to an independent tyre shop for a wheel alignment check. They had a all-bells-and-whistles computerised system but sadly not a technician to match. The cradle (for the want of a better name) that is clamped to the front wheel and that bears the laser that is seen by the rear equivalent, is supposed to locate on the rim of the wheel but the operator had sat one of its feet on a clip-on balancing weight rather than the rim itself. This, of course, gave a false datum some three millimetres out from where it should be. As politely as possible I asked if the system would allow for this superimposed misalignment and he grunted as he relocated it on the steel rim. There was a measure of spanner chucking and air-tool kicking but the job was done.
Another: my mother in law's hot water system was down and I had a quick look and concluded that the coil in the cylinder wasn't receiving sufficient volume from the DHW circuit. It was hot going in but cold coming out. As there was a BG contract in place I did no more but watched the BG chap (who turned up in a timely fashion) go through the diagnosis. He concluded that the flow pipe was blocked. I had already noticed that the ingoing pipe was hot but that the outgoing return was stone cold and mentioned this in a casual way. His view was that the heat was being conducted up one storey by the obviously static water held back by his 'blockage' and that this was why it was hot. Mine was that there was a huge airlock leaving the flow pipe with a mere trickle running along the bottom of the pipe accounting for the hot flow. He was about to leave because this 'blockage' was outside the terms of the contract but I could see him thinking as he gathered his gear. He vanished into the roof space and within a minute I heard water flowing and he came back down. It appears that on a previous visit to repair a burst pipe the isolating valve had never been reopened and over months the level in the make up tank had fallen to below the outlet. The rads worked because they still had a full circuit, but the DHW was almost dry.
I may try to be diplomatic in a proper British fashion, but I'm damned if I'm going to let a full-sized cock-up go unmentioned!
