Caravan – Mobile Home - Holiday Home – The Money Pit at last…..
And so we arrived in the car park of the camp site holiday parc at around 10 in the morning. This was some 2 hours in front of the time we had told Mrs Nice but Dim, the girl who sold us The Money Pit. Mrs Nice but Dim is exactly that, she’s very nice, very pleasant, very friendly but incredibly dim. If there is a light in there then it’s a very low energy one and wouldn’t provide enough illumination to wake a very tired moth. In fact it’s enough to say that as nice and pleasant as she is such is the massive lack of thinking capability and short and long term memory that she might be better titled as Mrs Goldfish. Put it this way, I wouldn’t trust her to run a bath let alone a sales operation in
So we contacted her and she was miraculously in the camp site mobile home park holiday parc adjoining sales office. There is no doubt she was pleased to see us, no doubt weighed down by the commission earned in concluding the deal with us and merrily she asked us to jump on the back of the custom built salesmobile stretch golf buggy so she could take us to The Money Pit. Now bear in mind we’ve seen the place only once before and hence the level of expectation and trepidation rose steeply as we were about to see where circa £36000 of my hard earned money had gone. Well we needn’t have worried unduly because The Money Pit was in situ in all its glory, brand spanking new and almost shining with newness. Even when we went in it smelt of newness, not unlike a brand new car. The decking was so new you could smell the aroma of freshly sawn wood everywhere (almost as if they’d only finished it 10 minutes earlier) and when the heater was turned on (it was only 10 degrees at this time of the morning) it gave off the pungent aroma of new heated metal and plastic. So far so good. The inventory was in the kitchen packed into a huge box as yet unopened. Busily we went through it, unwrapping each item as if it was Christmas Day and very soon it became obvious that much was missing. Simple but irritating things like a bin, a teapot, a sugar bowl, a broom, a mop (that’s getting a bit generation game now…). It sounds unimportant but these items are part of the agreement of what is supplied for sub-letting the damn thing.
Mrs Goldfish then went through the checklist and it soon became obvious that there were a number of snagging issues. A hole in the wall by the main door, a huge blind in the front window that only allowed one side or the other to move up or down in a seemingly illogical order related to Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle, a shutter in the kitchen window that refused to either open or close, a water leak in the second bathroom, a light in the drinks cabinet with no power feeding to it, bedroom doors that refused to close and a sofa bed so firmly jammed into place that the only way I could see of removing it was to cut away a large chunk of mobile home and coils of spare co-axial cable in the main bedroom and, bizarrely, in the main bathroom.
It was built in
Over the week I spent a proportion of each day pestering Mrs Goldfish and Damien, the “owners” contact for the missing inventory items and we managed to get all but 3 snags repaired, the rest requiring an engineer from the manufacturer, along with getting the air conditioning installed, the storage shed and getting a decent Chiminea style barbecue. But here’s the rub………it is my theory that London Transport, specifically the Underground managed to re-define the length of a minute some years ago from the standard 60 seconds to somewhere around 90 seconds. If you’ve ever waited for a train and the board has said “next train 1 Minute” you’ll know exactly what I’m saying. Well, the French have improved on that. Not satisfied with defining the metre and discarding the yard, they seem to have redefined the length of 1 minute into something that’s at least 5 minutes but sometimes longer. Thus, when Cedric the air con guy says he has to go for 10 minutes he actually disappears for an hour or so. When Patrique the gardener says 15 minutes he comes back some 3 hours or so later! So, a lot of the week is spent waiting around the caravan holiday home for various French workmen to turn up and do what I’ve paid for! And Mrs Goldfish who is English was exactly the same, as is her husband (the site handyman) who also seems to have adopted French standards regarding the passage of time.
Mrs Goldfish actually said to me that she’d be back in 15 minutes on one visit to see how things were going, with the rest of the inventory. That was about Midday and we never saw her again that day. The next day she promised again to be there by 18:00 and turned up at 19:45, but with no inventory. Mr Goldfish promised one day to be with me at 14:00 but again never appeared. It must be the French way, but when you live in a society such as ours which thrives on a “customer is king” ethos this French version of Manana is hard to adapt to.
Anyway, have a good weekend everyone. I will be trying to hide on a golf course to avoid the torture of watching my beloved
Later, Grocerjack
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