Friday, May 08, 2009

Captain Kebab #3


I must tell you about the thing that happened last night. For a while I'd been detecting a strange smell in the downstairs of our house.I attributed it to my two teenage sons and their various forms of footwear lying strewn around the foot of the stairs...but the smell increased, and popping my head into the under stairs cupboard I realised what it was.....: Gas. This smell had been around for a couple of days and I felt foolish for not realising it...so I rang the gas suppliers emergency number and got a garbled list of do's and don'ts from the young man on the other end of the line. Around 40 minutes later..at about midnight, a gas fitter arrived and quickly found the gas was leaking from an 'Anaconda' pipe..we'd had a new central heating boiler installed in January and apparently, a spot of solder had fallen on to the pipe..the result (I'm told) is that it slowly corrodes the pipe.
Thankfully the gas fitter had a spare Anaconda pipe and was able to fix it and be on his way by 00:30 am....and my family and i would be able to sleep peacefully in our beds and not wake up the next morning and find we were all in orbit!
Reminds me of the old joke: A man jumps out of an aeroplane...he tries to pull the ripcord of his parachute but nothing happens...so he pulls the ripcord of the reserve chute...again nothing happens.As he is plummeting earthwards...he sees a man coming up towards him...as the man approaches he shouts out: "Hey...do you know antything about parachutes?"...The man as he flies past replies: "NO!...do you know anything about gas cookers?"
They say "Life is a 'gas'"...I think it's preferable to "Life's a blast!".

3 comments:

Preeti Shenoy said...

Scary! Thank God its fixed.I'd have run out of the house screaming and continued to run right upto India had it happened to me!
Preeti

Devil Mood said...

hahaha!
Well, I'm glad you're safe. That's why we don't have gas here in my house, my Mum is terrified.

VJ said...

Niall....we had a similar incident in our home...every time we stepped out to the Patio there was a strong gas smell!...

we finally called the gas service emergency number and the response was very quick and they realised we had left a switched on(I guess it was when the house was handed over to us)