Yes, I know, a little vulgar, but the only title I could think of was from Morrissey, which I was tempted to use, but thought, who of my visitors would guess this. Oh, the alternative was The Edges Are No Longer Parallel.
I consider myself a good neighbour, and as well as chatting to my neighbours, taking in parcels etc., I put the bins out for my immediate neighbour as she is getting on. We will ignore the fact that her son lives with her but is too screwed up to do that in case someone looks at him, she also says he is lazy and quite useless at doing anything asked of him. But this is another story for another time.
So, my story. There is a company in the village that deals with wealth management to the far right of our house (a large gap of land separates us). The owner has now rented the land at the back of my house for car parking space for his office people, leaving their spaces for their filthy rich clients. Fair enough, but, it is dark at home time, and none of the females there wants to park there due to the dark, the only lights that shine by it are our garden light. The condition of them renting it was that they locked the gates every night and little or no disturbance to us. They had spruced it up and it looks quite presentable now. But, the two days they have used it over the last 2 months, I have had to lock up as they drove out and left it wide open.
So, the other week they asked if I would be willing to help with a security light from my house so they can see. I was happy to go along with it thinking, it will just be one LED light that runs off my garden electrics. Being this north in the UK, we have about 6 hours of very dim sunlight, so solar lighting isn’t all that good. They were going to get it installed and would pay me for the use of power. All good so far, however, not content with a light, they decided that they wanted full security floodlighting throughout and electric sliding gates with high tech passive infrared scanners that they vehicles would use to auto access the area, and computerised fobs for visitors, of course, I had no idea of these new plans, and unbeknownst to me, they had arranged an electrician to survey my home with a view to installing massive armoured cabling from my house to the land. So from a single wire from my garden to the rear with a light to a full-on project. WTF!
I had spoken to the owner of the company and told him he cannot under any circumstances disturb M, or expect him to do anything when I was not at home. He agreed as he knows M’s conditions, but then blatantly ignored it and arranged for the installers to call when he knew I was not there! M ignored the workers calling as he knew that it was a condition of mine.
Now, my home is on three floors. The ground is a small area that contains an anti-space and one of my staircases (my neighbour lives under our first floor (2-bed place, so you can get the size of our home). The first floor is the main living area with my lounge, kitchen, bathroom, main bedroom, two square hallways, one with my spiral staircase to the next floor which contains another two large bedrooms and another large hall. The logistics of this is that my electrical fuse box is in the furthest point in the house, and to install all this crap, my electric system would probably have to be upgraded which they have not considered as this costs money, all my floors and carpeting pulled up through the whole house to get the armoured cable from said box to where the main staircase is and then either take it through one of the closets and then through the wall and down to the downstairs hall and eventually out the building. The last part would be visible which would be a big no for me. The other way would be to put it through the wall to the outside and all the way around the house to the said place. Apart from being unsightly, the amount of cable would be enormous.
I only found out about their plans when T, the gate maker who I have known for many years called me to say about the electrician needed access to do the survey for the electrics for the gates! I asked what he meant and what was going on and quickly put a stop to it all.
I have told him that if he wants to do all this, he will have to get contractors in and run the electrics from his office as his plans were just not feasible.
The whole episode really proved to me how much people will take advantage of a goodwill gesture and run with it until they have ripped the balls clean off. In conclusion, lesson learned!
Mr Knitter 