Health & Safety be damned! #2

The house next door has been part-built for at least a year and a half now. A father is building it, on weekends only, for his daughter as part of her dowry. From time to time she turns up to inspect the latest work, or to deliver boxes of tiles she has selected for the bathroom, or to compare paint colours for the outside of the house.

Over the last few weeks things have been getting a little busier particularly with regard to the external electricity box.

It has been made, measured, removed, extended and measured again. Then someone appeared on Saturday morning to chip out the concrete directly above the box – it seems the measuring might have been an important part. Next someone came along to measure out the newly chipped section, and noticed that it was neither square nor straight. He was followed by someone to fix a holding piece of timber to the back before the frame was fitted and then removed, and then re-fitted by someone else before the door was finally hung.

Surely, in the whole history of house-building, an electricity box has never had such attention?

Aradippou’s most pampered electricity box

We saw a dozen people on eight or more occasions working on this. Then we decided life was too short so we stopped counting and went to the beach instead.

Anyway, with all this activity we knew that it was only a matter of time before the electricity board appeared to connect the house to the local supply. On the plus side this would mean that the builders would no longer need to ask to plug their kango drill into our supply – yes, we were a little surprised by that one too. On the negative side we expected to lose our power supply while they hooked the other house up and since we didn’t expect to get any notice we envisaged problems in that the washing machine or something would be bound to be on when that happened.

Well, it turns out we were wrong. Why bother turning off the supply when you can just shimmy up the nearest electricity pole and add a new connection. Why fuss when you have all the protection that three pairs of gloves can supply?

Putting on the second pair of gloves. Are they marigolds??

When we saw the palm-tree trimming going on we thought that was mad. Obviously it was just a warm-up for the main act.

Safe to go with three pairs of gloves protecting him against electrocution

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