So said former fat bastard Meat Loaf on his epic ditty, Bat Out Of Hell. I struggled with that lyric for a while but now I think I know what he was getting at. The truth is that anything gadget-like or labour saving that you buy provides a mere few minutes of unbridled joy before it gets discarded through boredom, or no-one uses it, or because the damn thing doesn’t quite do everything it promised, or is too hard to use, or you decide that it’s raison d’etre was never something you really needed anyway. One thing for sure, it’ll break down and your hard earned cash might as well have been shoved in the washing machine until it becomes a pulpy unusable mush.
Why am I even discussing this? Well, it seems to me that fate is playing some cruel tricks on me at the moment. In the last 2 months, precisely 5 months after converting from my comparatively cheap interest only mortgage to a hideously expensive repayment one, we have seen mechanical failure on household appliances ona an unprecedented scale, forcing me to uncover capital investment funds in order to keep the operational business of daily life on track.
1.) The vacuum cleaner packed up earlier this year. After 4 years of tackling the crap left behind by Kid and Pie, plus all the other members of the Brood, it decided it wanted to die and hence committed vacuum cleaner suicide. Of course, to me it was just fucked. We got by because we either didn’t bother cleaning the carpet or borrowed and hid LittleSis’s cleaner. It was no good, she found it and she demanded it back and we ended buying a new one – cost £130
2.) The Fan Oven enter the world of The Fucked when it decided to finally give up, extending cooking times for oven chips (as an example) from 20 minutes (crispy) out to a week or so. Replaced – cost £400 plus £50 for the install.
3.) The Shower – the only one in the house is in the en-suite and is a gravity fed shower. It’s had the cartridge replaced once about 3 years ago but this time it’s gone and I couldn’t face just a refurbished one. It gets used around 4 times a day and so like anything that heavily used it also became fucked. New integral power shower purchased – cost £275 plus somewhere in the region of £180 for the plumber to install and cable it up. Plus a new one in the main bathroom for Kid and Pie to abuse to their hearts content.
4.) The Shower Cubicle for fucks sake – the “bi-fold” door is held together in the middle by two plastic lugs secured to one half of the door with a screw and the other by virtue of the lug being inserted into the tubular spine. Yep, one broke a few weeks back and now the others gone. Can you buy a new door on it’s own? Yeah…..you guessed it….can you fuck! Unless the superglue works then that’s another £300 needed, plus the cost of install unless it’s so fucking ridiculously easy even a DIY fuckwit like me can do it.
5.) The final insult? I fucking hope so. Yesterday HellsBells came back from lunch to find the dishwasher still going. It had been put on a wash cycle by me at 07:00. She discovered it at 4 in the afternoon. Now, I all in favour of dedication to the task…but 9 hours to wash one load…and still it was going. Yep, it’s fucked and to add insult to injury we have a “semi-integrated” one…..functionally the same as a normal free standing one, but apparently the biggest difference between them is…the fucking cost. Another £350 for me to find.
I am almost scared to go home in case the front door falls off it’s fucking hinges.
Have a good weekend, Later Grocerjack
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