Poles Apart

The new curtain pole in the lounge. It may be on the wall now, but at one point the fitter was in severe danger of having it inserted up his backside! It was obvious from the start that the bloke was totally stressed out. We’d been told he would be with us in “the afternoon” but had to go to another appointment at 4 o’clock. Might have been ok, but he was late arriving and before he got the first mount in place, I’d discovered the new vanes for the kitchen blinds were the wrong length, which necessitated much photo taking and phone calls to the boss to try and sort it out. So when he stripped the head of one of the mounting screws and could neither screw it fully home or remove it, I thought he was going to have a stroke! The only course of action he could think of was to abandon the fitting and come back another day. Wasn’t going to happen. Taking matters into my own hands I grabbed my Mole Grips and removed the screw in under thirty seconds - he’d been trying to do something for over ten minutes before owning up to the problem. Replacement screw fitted and the mount was in place. But when he came to secure the pole to the mount he dropped the special screw that holds it in place. Looking at where he thought he’d dropped it, I noticed a hole in the floorboards - could it have gone down there? Once again I had to take over and I lifted part of the board to look under the floor. Nothing. He reckoned we’d be ok with two out of three screws in place and he’d order a replacement for the missing one. At which point I crossed to the other side of the room and picked up something off the carpet. Was this the missing screw? It was, though who knows how it ended up six feet away from where he was convinced it fell! Amazingly, the fitting of the identical pole in the bedroom went without a hitch, but the time lost with the other one meant there was no time to fit the new blinds in the study. So a return visit will be required anyway. At the end of the day, the poles look as good as we hoped they would - we could just have done without the intervening drama.