Waiting for windows

The flat that Kevin and I moved into in August had been newly converted from office buildings, never been lived in before. It eliminated a lot of problems that can crop up when moving into a house or flat; things like the carpet being infested with dog hair, or strange stains hidden underneath the sofa, broken (or terribly old) kitchen appliances, and so on. However, we have encountered a small set of problems characteristic of the flat being Brand Shiny New. Things like the electrically-live cooker hood, the lack of a phone line (both sorted out within a mere six weeks), and the hole we discovered in the window three or four weeks ago.

Now, you may wonder why we never noticed a hole in the window prior to this. To be honest, it's just a small gap between the window and the window frame; tiny enough that you can't see it unless your head's at exactly the right angle, but certainly large enough to see daylight through the other side. A number of other windows have draughts too, getting ever more noticeable now that the weather's turned colder and the wind's stepped up. Yesterday we even had the blind blowing out behind a tightly shut window due to the draught!

We phoned the letting agents to inform them of the problem, and didn't hear anything further for another ten days. Finally we managed to get an appointment for last Friday afternoon (last week). After having moved all the furniture in various rooms and cleared window ledges so that people could get in to fix things, Kevin phoned back at 4:30pm to check where the window-fixey people had got to. Nobody at the company knew quite what had happened; nor did they when he phoned again on Monday. Eventually we got another appointment for this morning, and lived in the hope that come the weekend, we could turn the heating down and be warm in the absence of draughts.

Today's appointment was for 10:15am, and when I got home from Warwick four hours later Kevin met me with a manic grin. Apparently the last he'd heard, the window man "had been on our road at 10:30", but never turned up. A couple of phonecalls later, Kevin turned to me and said, "You'll never guess."

My sarcastic reply of, "Car-jacked?" turned out to be far closer to the truth than I imagined — apparently the guy had pulled over somewhere on our (very long) road and got out to ask some builders where to find our building. While this was happening, someone nicked all the tools from his van, and also his mobile phone; hence he spent a lot of the day at the police station.

Someone's coming on Monday instead to fix our windows. Maybe.