A middle class man has quickly got out of his depth in a conversation with a boiler repair engineer, it has emerged. Samuel Da Costa, 42, called out the local tradesman telling him that his boiler was on the blink and that he thought it might be something to do with the pilot light.
However, after just a couple of early questions from the engineer about the cylinder jacket and whether he had noticed any kettling, Da Costa immediately started sweating up and struggling for responses.
'Things started so well', noted Da Costa. I made Pete - he told me his name after I shook his hand strongly at the door and looked him in the eye - a drink of tea with 3 sugars. We had a solid conversation about how hard it was to find our house, being just off the main road and with the sat nav taking you to the village post office round the corner rather than here.'
'But then he changed gear when he opened up the boiler and I felt physically sick when he asked me about whether someone had looked at the filling loop recently', continued Da Costa. 'And his comment about the thermocouple perhaps being a bit knackered seemed to have a slight inflection at the end, almost forcing me into some kind of response.'
'I just kept repeating 'The boiler doesn't do that whooshing sound any more when you turn on the hot tap' to everything he said after that', said a dejected Da Costa. 'I had nothing else to give him.
'Nice cup at tea at the Da Costas', noted Pete to himself in his van after finishing the job. 'Those Worcester Bosch combi boilers are a nightmare though - you just can't get the parts to fix a broken whooshing noise when you turn the hot tap on anymore'.