Whilst You Were Out

With our supreme leader announcing his intention to close all of our post offices and make us deliver our own mail by hand – but still having to first buy a stamp – it got me thinking about the wonders of home deliveries and the horror of a visit from the repair man to fix something that has broken down at the most inconvenient of moments.

Whilst it’s annoying at the best of times, not only have you had to take a day off work, but it’s the simple fact that you can never get an accurate arrival time that frustrates me the most. I mean, you speak to the nice girl on the phone to arrange a time and all she can suggest is “sometime between 8.30 in the morning and June”.

So, it’s your first day off work in months and you still end up getting up bright and early knowing that - if you don’t - they’ll be ringing the doorbell at 8am prompt. Still, you know it’s a totally pointless exercise because you also know that there’s no way in a month on Sundays that they will – but you just can’t afford take that chance.

The morning passes – still nothing – and you have to endure early morning television, endless cups of tea, lots of tutting and staring out of the window like an abandoned puppy. Lunchtime arrives and you manage to find something to eat from the fridge – after all you emptied it at the beginning of the week in order to make sandwiches at work - and still nothing.

Another hour – and cup of tea – passes with not an engineer in sight. Was that the front door bell?! You dash to the door, open it and find no one there. Still, it doesn’t stop you looking up and down the road just to make sure.

After all of that tea, and that slightly out of date food you had from the fridge for lunch, you really do need to go to the toilet. Unable to cross you legs any longer, and after first looking out of the window to make sure no one is outside, you head for the loo.

Naturally, you knew it would have to happen. It really had to – I mean it happened the last time you had to ring for an engineer. You’re sat on the throne with your trousers around your ankles and that fateful sound is heard. Yeap, it’s the front door bell (I’m not sure what you were thinking of!).

So, after desperately trying to pull up your trousers whilst heading to the door, in the mere twenty seconds it takes you to make it downstairs and to the door you hear a van driving up the road and you find a yellow card your doormat with those fateful words Whilst You Were Out written on it...