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Student Houses and the "quality" brand goods within...
My good friend Alex and I have had many a laff over the cheap crap utensils, white goods etc. provided in the student houses we lived in over the 2 years of hedonism, booze and Trisha that constituted uni life.

We once compiled an exhaustive list (in between the hedonism, booze and Trisha it sometimes got a bit boring avoiding work) of all this cheap toot. Of what I can remember, our hoover was labelled "The Boss" & we had a "Candy" washing machine that had 12 settings and only worked on one, and even then that would take 1 1/2 hours to go through a cycle.

The drum was so small you could fit about 3 pairs of jeans in it before it was full. The walls in our first house were so thin that when a man came to fix our bathroom extractor fan he drilled into my friend's bedroom. We had "underfloor" heating because the hot water pipes were so close to the surface of the flooring.

In a similar vein, the oven in the kitchen was against the lounge wall so that when you were sat watching telly you didn't need any heating on even in the depths of winter.

However, the crowning jewel in our crappily fitted houses was our pride and joy - the Horstmann Amethyst 7 "boiler" which failed to work unless both the hot water and heating switches were turned on. It was 60% efficient - according to the engineer who came in numerous times and attempted to fix it - and was so old that the plumber (who was attending for other reasons - our last house was pretty out of shape) told us that he'd never even seen one, and he'd been doing the job for 25 years.

It eventually got replaced after a lengthy battle.

In June.
(Mon 7th Jan 2008, 15:23, More)