Laxative

The new term for our IT students opened yesterday. Today there were about twenty students in the lab during the time when the server lets them browse. Who can blame them, they have not classes. Word is out that school doesn’t start when it says it will. So the staff don’t turn up, and don’t prepare the timetable until the first week because they know from experience that “the students won’t be there anyway”. The students don’t turn up because they don’t like being at college and, anyway, classes don’t start until later. The whole thing is very lax.

Yesterday an old man with a brace of adjustable pipe-spanners came to my house to make the tap work again after it abruptly stopped about a week ago. After spraying myself and Johnson, the cook from the convent, with water he reassembled the tap and, behold, it worked… Until the evening when it abruptly stopped again. Now life is the same as last week except that I paid someone 100 bob to spray me and Johnson with water. Sounds a bit like Burning Man.

This morning I had a man come and put some wire mesh up over my chimneys to keep the rats from falling in, as they have done in the past. He came yesterday and guessed that we’d need 2M of mesh. I went and bought the mesh and a kilo(!) of binding wire. Today he hauled himself up onto my roof and we discovered that we really needed about 2.2M. The gap, he claimed, would not be a problem because he would fill it with the binding wire. After his first attempt (spiders being fed caffiene spring to mind) he claimed the rats would not be able to pass.
“What about that big hole?”, I ask.
“This one?”, he answers pointing at a hole as big as his own hand.
*sigh*

I think I’m seeing a pattern developing.