To man a temporary water pump as one of the pumps near our house has broken down.

Just a diesel pump I think, or it might be running off of a van.

The answer is four.

Two asleep in one van, two Reading the paper and having a brew in the other. I wish I could go to work, have a kip and get paid for it. Typical.

No wonder my water bills are extortionate.

Privatised water company then, just dont pay the bill.

This is what’s difficult about preparing for utility faults outside of normal working hours. We complain when we’re paying for guys to sit about and then complain when there aren’t enough guys to fix stuff as quickly as we want. It’s near impossible to know how much stuff is going to break and when.

Fancy adding £50 a year to your electricity bill to pay for digging teams, Jointing teams, fitting teams, linesmen, controller, co-ordinators and engineers to be on standby just in case your power goes off?

It’s all a balancing act. Cost vs response time. No one ever thinks we’ve got the balance right though.

Could be the two that are a sleep have been manning the pump for a while and catching up on sleep and the other two are fitters and believe it or not but maybe it’s their dinner break.

Better still go and ask them.

Onzadog has it, balance of resource against risk of emergency. In a utiopoan world the pump should be set up to run automatically with some level switches or wotnot and the same crew should be responsible for setting up several of those and then checking on them throughout the day / night

Depending on the area, they could be manning it permanently so it doesn’t get stolen.

I wish I could go to work, have a kip and get paid for it.

In that case you should apply for a job with the water company. You’re welcome.

If it’s full of sh1t then then they’ll be in for a surprise if they pull the hoses

Depending on the area, they could be manning it permanently so it doesn’t get stolen.

a pump has many saleable bits on it for scrap or just for resale and stupid idiots would think nothing of stealing it for profit and allowing peoples homes to flood.
Even the services manning the current crisis down south have had vehicles stolen and houses looted

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Just seen the ‘rapid response unit’ van arrive.

Twenty hours after the initial fault.

Strangely I’ve got the theme tune to Steptoe and Son playing in my head as I watch the well-oiled machine swing efficiently and effortlessly into action.

Mind you just paint out the word ‘rapid’ and replace it with ‘eventual’ and it’d be more accurate. Oh no, hang on. They’d pay someone fifteen quid an hour to do that as well. It really doesn’t matter, stick it on the bills…….

The other day there was a water leak on a road on my way home, half way across Cannock Chase.

It was dark, cold, windy and chucking it down, and there were four utterly drenched and filthy looking guys at the bottom of a massive hole full of manky muddy water presumably trying to fix it.

I didn’t envy them in the slightest, it must be a thoroughly miserable job when it’s like that. If keeping the status quo involves occasionally having easy jobs with more people than are strictly necessary then that seems fair to me.

No wonder my water bills are extortionate.

Just out of interest, how much is your bill?

What do you do for a living danny?

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Hello iam dan i lyk footy and i support oufc4life and everton swindon r shit and i h8 them more dan anything

No wonder my water bills are extortionate.

I may be misremembering, but isn’t the lion’s share of the water bill not to cover the cost of delivering water, but rather the taking away of it again?

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Hello iam dan i lyk footy and i support oufc4life and everton swindon r shit and i h8 them more dan anything

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swindon r shit and i h8 them more dan anything

Big plus one to this 😀

Not here Cougar! TWO companies – one delivers, one takes it away :-/
Did I mention that they AUTOMATICALLY charge you for everything too without checking….
So even if you have soak aways, water butts, etc they charge you for water going to the public drain!
My house has the gutters from the houses EITHER side draining into my property yet they charge for this. Both neighbours have no waste water draining into the public highway yet get charged, the gutters on mine go to private land and they charge me too.
Well they did until I found out about it and reclaimed it back to 2004…. They weren’t happy…

That’s correct cougar although as pointed out above, in some places there’s more than one company involved.

You can get a good reduction on your water bill by collecting all your own water off your property but that’s a lot of water. Obviously unless you collect your own poo water you’ll need to pay for that to be taken away as well.

I’m guessing that danny is in the Severn Trent region who do both so he can probably install some butts and soakaways to get a reduction if he finds it completely unbearable. I’ve always thought the price of water and waste water is incredibly good value, even before I worked for a water company and actually began to understand the absolutely mind-boggling amount of infrastructure that is required to make it happen. It takes years of working in the business just to start to get your head round the scale of the thing.

Two asleep in one van, two Reading the paper and having a brew in the other. I wish I could go to work, have a kip and get paid for it. Typical.

You may find that it takes all four to initially get the thing set up. Also, the Company will probably have “Safe Systems of Work” that will require a minimum number of men and certain trades to operate certain gear. This may cover the equipment being operated in more hazardous situations where the 4 people are really necessary and it is is too difficult to change them for simpler locations.

Just a guess mind, I have no idea of their working procedures!

Yeah, in hindsight, I may have erred on the side of ‘ranty’ to start with. I had nearly been involved in an accident caused by a white Beemer about half an hour before, so perhaps I was being a bit unreasonable. I’m sure the rapid response thing being twenty hours after the problem could be due to the amount of flooding elsewhere(!)

So, there you go, I am contrite about this. Still, it doesn’t send a great message if two blokes are having a kip on the job, does it? If it is a health and safety thing, then being asleep doesn’t scream good practice.

You live and learn. Mind you, I’m not sure what all that shit about Everton and Swindon was, but maybe I’m not in the clique that appreciates little in-jokes like that.