Categories: uncategorized
Date: 26 October 2006 11:49:36
I was given an unexpected poke.
Poke as in poke of chips, although that may not clarify things much, especially if you are one of those who think that poke is something that goes with peek. The other day I was reminded how my default language is a long way from standard English when someone referred to gambling tokens (poker chips) and I thought they were talking about a bag of fried potatoes (poke o' chips). So anyway, the poke I received was the bag sort, but I should mention that there were actually 10 bags, not just one. And in total they weighed a quarter of a ton. Which is one way of saying that these chips were not fried potatoes. They were stone chippings. So yes, someone delivered a quarter of a ton of stone to my house yesterday while I was at work. Living in a student town one gets used to a certain sort of practical joke (like the day when all the cars on one street had a slice of bread stuck onto their aerial), but this was of the wildly inconvenient variety if a joke is what it was. Now there is another house along the street whose number is very similar to ours and whose post often gets delivered to us (mainly because the number is actually wrong, so for once the post office are not to blame). Since the surname on the invoice actually matched the residents of that house my first guess was that it was perhaps them. So I looked up their number in the phone book. Unfortunately 2 and a half pages of entries all have the same surname so it took a while and I eventually gave up and phoned directory enquiries. It was ex directory. Well, that explained why I couldn't find it in the book. So when the rain finally stopped I went round to the house and asked if they'd ordered some stone. They hadn't. Curses. So now I had to worry about the stone and about the embarrassment of going up to someone almost at random and asking if they wanted some stone. It started to feel like I was perpetrating some bizarre practical joke instead of being the victim. Finally, after hours of distractedly worrying, I remembered that another house on an adjacent street but with the same number was being re-rendered. It had to be them, but unfortunately the house was an office and charity shop so there was nothing I could do until this morning to check if I was right or not. I have to go past there every morning and I was just dreading getting there today and finding the scaffolding gone and all the work finished. I needn't have worried - the work was clearly only half done, and looked as if they needed some more stone to finish the job. There weren't any builders there to speak to, but someone in the office agreed that it was probably their stone and agreed to phone the builders to confirm. I left at that point, so I'm hoping that when I get home today the stone will be gone.
If not, I think I'm going to get some pva glue and start re-rendering my house.