I would love to have a pic for this but I don’t. Imagine if you will a cheery chappie standing outside your garden gate, armed with a metal rod topped off with a rounded piece of wood. This is stuck in a hole in the ground and our pal is bent over with an ear to the wooden bit.
“Howrya, Lindie! Do you want to come here and have a listen?”
Our friend is the man from the local council, perennially cheerful and driving around in a van chatting to anyone he sees and attempting to sort our problems. We all know him. He lives in the city centre but has worked with Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council for 30 years. He knows every blade of grass in Trimleston, Glenomena, Seafield and Woodbine.This is a man who loves his job.
When my father was alive, he once bundled him into the van for a drive, listening to Dad’s stories; an act of unselfconscious kindness. He asks for Dad; I tell him that he had died last June. He tells me that his own mother died of Alzheimer’s in January.
We first got to know this chap after I put a ski machine on a skip. He came along and asked if he could take it because he was determined to lose weight. “Be my guest,” I said. A day later he came back – some of the screws were missing.
Later he told me he had joined a gym. I would get a robust greeting when running up the road.
When water started seeping out of a crack in my driveway, I had rung the council’s emergency line. First surpise – I got a real, live human being. How incredibly refreshing not to be asked by a computer to press button one or two or ten and not to be told to hold because my call was important.
“Is the leak a danger to the water supply of the area?” I was asked. No, I replied, but nonetheless, I felt something should be done about it.
Five minutes later, the phone rings. It is my pal. “Now Lindie, what can I do for you?” he asks. I tell him about the leak.
“Have you been listening to your pipes?” he says. “Eh what?” I say. “You know – have you heard any noises? ” I tell him no.
He promises that he will try and get around the next morning and gives me his mobile number in case he isn’t there “by dinner hour”. He has a problem with his van, has to go to Sandyford and anyway it’s late and he can’t face the Rock Road at this hour (sensible man).As a sidebar I get a story about his knees and them things you put in your shoes – orthotics.
The steel rod topped by the well-worn wood was his way of listening to the pipes. He can hear nothing. Neither can I when I try. Plastic pipes aren’t as noisy as the old copper, he tells me. We walk into the garden and stand staring at the obvious seepage from the edge of the lawn. He can do nothing, he tells me, asking whether I have insurance, but adding that there is a even damper area somewhere up the road, which has been like that for years and bothered not a soul. No wonder we have water shortages.
Anyway, I’ll have to dig a hole and find out if there is a pipe under there.
Ok, so he didn’t do much – but how nice to find that there are some living, breathing human beings still working for the institutions of the state.
Can we start a campaign against call centres?
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