Re: Not so handymen



I used to work with just such an incompetent by the name of Charlie and he was a proper one.

If a job needed something to be screw-fixed, you could bet your life that Charlie would use nails instead. Screws, on the other hand, were to be treated as nails and hammered into the wall - whether they wanted to go or not. If he was forced to use a drill with a screw bit, he'd keep the drill on full tilt until the screw head was worn out. So, with no slots on the head, we'd have to get the baby angle grinder and cut the heads off and then slowly unscrew the shaft with a vice grips. As I type this I can still hear the WHIRR-BOCKETTA-BOCKETTA-WHIRR as he let the drill bit bounce around on the head of the screw.

Christ but I can still remember the panic whenever we'd a heavy workload on and Charlie was assigned to your team. You could guarantee that everything would now take three times as long to get done. Charlie you see, had an opinion on how everything should be done and would insist on trying his method first. When it failed, as it usually did, he'd try again, and again and.... before storming off somewhere else to 'perfect' his method.

He used to insist on having the local radio station on all day at ear-splitting volume while he'd agree with the mentalists who'd phone up to complain about everything and then lecture us on why the country was going to the dogs and how it was all our generation's fault. All this in a public building with people attempting to work in nearby offices and people trying to help members of the public while Charlie made it seem like a metal-bashing factory.

I still break out in a cold sweat at the time when, atop a 30 foot ladder, hanging on like grim death as I attempted to repair a loose gutter bracket, I was scared shitless by Charlie shaking the ladder violently in order to get my attention. After that near death experience, I carried on with the task and made to come down. It was then that I noticed that Charlie, instead of holding the ladder steady for me, had fecked off for his tea break without warning.

As for costly mistakes - a couple of grand's worth of wrecked tools (he dropped a couple of drills from a great height and broke a bench saw because he attempted to saw through a lump of timber studded with nails), broken windows (shoved a ladder through them - twice) and God only knows how many boxes of the wrong sized screws and other components when he returned from the suppliers.

And to think he used to wax lyrical about how he was quite the DIY expert and had done thousands of quid worth of improvements to the family home.
(Fanta Menace Is tall enough to see over the fence, Sat 27 Oct 2007, 13:46, 1 reply)

Reminds me of my bro-in-law...
As you can see, I'm called snee - a shortened form of sneesh, which means "something small or insignificant" (no, not that - get ya minds out of the gutter).

My bro-in-law (God bless him) isn't the sharpest tool in the shed, he works as a 'yardboy' or some such thing. Now, not saying he's slow, but he's called 'swee' because when he's asked to sweep up, that's as far as he gets.

And it annoys me to feck when he remarks on how similar our nicknames are...
( snee held his breath since, Wed 31 Oct 2007, 14:18, closed)