Whenever something goes wrong in the house there are people who will say, "get a little man". Where are these little men hiding? And when you find them, why are they even more impossible to deal with than they are to locate? If they do turn up (which is usually while you are on the school-run, having waited in all day), this is no guarantee that they will actually do anything constructive. "I'll have to order the part," is their favourite phrase. But that's the best possible outcome, considering.
There was the plumber who cleared a blocked sewer line, then used my toothbrush to scrub his hands. Fortunately I saw him, or I might have come down with cholera. There was the handsome carpenter who failed to show, then eventually turned up with a black-eye because his girlfriend beat him up. "It was my fault, she was drunk and I provoked her," he said before spending half the day giving out about the contractor who employed him. He nearly got another black eye.
There was the man who came to fix the cooker and did such an obviously incompetent job, that I didn't want to pay him. He threatened to take a wrench to the cooker. He got his money. There was the handyman who appeared with a new van and a mobile - and couldn't do anything but hang pictures. An hour of picture-hanging cost £55. "I don't know why anyone bothers calling me because I'm quite useless actually," he said.
There was the time the heating broke and I told the gas heating company that I had a small baby and the house was freezing and couldn't wait three days for a repair man, only to be told: "That's what they all say." There was the tiler who measured the bathroom floor and approved the amount of tiles we supplied, then when the floor was nearly complete announced he hadn't enough tiles, which was a pity, because they were out of stock.
There was the man from the bathroom company, who turned up - under pressure - to view my broken toilet seat and said that two white plastic discs would do the trick. They arrived in the post. What was I supposed to do, swallow them? I installed them as best I could. Toilet seat still broken.
There was the kitchen carpenter, brought in by a contractor, who did the minimum he could get away with on the kitchen, but volunteered to install an indoor water feature. It turned out he sold them on the side.
I can get a waterfall, but I can't get my toilet fixed. Currently, I have doors that don't close, doorknobs that don't work, dead ceiling lighting, malfunctioning computer equipment, a broken phone socket, a wobbly table, a power shower that has never worked properly since it was installed and an integrated dishwasher without the door panel on it because no one will put it on for me. There are plumbers, there are carpenters and there are dishwasher repairmen. But there is no such thing, apparently, as an integrated kitchen door installer.
I know the list of repair jobs is similar in houses up and down the road. The minor things, we learn to live with. The major things tend to be more trying. Our central heating hasn't been working since January. Dublin Gas sent out a repair man who "repaired" it, then it broke within 48 hours. A week later, he returned, "repaired it" and it broke again within a week. A week after that, he didn't bother to come back. He said it wasn't worth repairing because the guy who installed it had done such a terrible job.
Why do they always do this? It doesn't matter if the last guy was the current guy's blood brother. The last guy is always an incompetent. I have yet to meet a repairman who didn't criticise the work of the repairman/handyman/electrician/ plumber/tiler/painter who did the job the last time. This you have to listen to patiently and with a smile if you are to have any hope of retrieving the situation. Never lose your temper. Try not to cry.
Repairmen, in general, are pessimists, doomsayers and all round cynical blokes. My boiler is an example. The repairman-not advised me to replace the whole thing even though it's a mere five years old and would cost £1,200 to replace. It needs a new fan. The repairman-not says "it's not worth it". To whom? I wonder. I paid £36 for this advice. When I went to Dublin Gas to question the advice, Dublin Gas said it was nothing to do with them because the repairman was a - wait for it - contractor.
In the meantime, I've decided that central heating is unhealthy and that coal fires are cosy.
A friend with a broken boiler was told the same thing recently, that she should replace the whole thing rather than fix it. A call to another repairman got a very different result: a repair costing £200 and a boiler working good as new.
I know that the answer to all this is to track down the responsible person, threaten law suits, remain assertive to the end. The problem is, who has got the time when you're working and trying to raise a family?
The worst happens when you try to repair things yourself. Two nights before Christmas, I tried to hang a shelf in the bathroom and drilled a hole in the plumbing. The kitchen carpenter would have been happy. I finally had my indoor water feature. A panicked call to an obliging architect-friend resulted in the introduction of the jack-of-all-trades-from-heaven into my life. Within half an hour my repair-angel had the plumbing fixed and within the month had the house painted, an ingenious system of new shelving in the laundry room and the bathroom floor tiling sorted out. My friends were clamouring for his telephone number and he got jobs up and down the road.
Perhaps a little too optimistically, I presented him with a short-list of 10 other things that needed doing. "I have a few other little odd jobs," I said hopefully. "So does my mother," said my hero, before disappearing into the sunset.