On a Wednesday morning the doorbell rings while I’m working in the kitchen. My wife, who is expecting a delivery, opens the door. “No, I don’t want brake pads,” she says. I don’t hear the reply. “Because I’m not a garage,” my wife says. “Do I look like a garage?”
There actually is a small garage just beyond the end of our back garden. Only a brick wall separates it from my office shed – my working days are punctuated by the bright ring of dropped wrenches and the grating whine of power tools.
Because of this proximity, we get a lot of the mechanic’s post, and many of his deliveries come to us first. Sometimes it’s brake pads; sometimes it’s a headlamp unit for an Audi A3. Once I was asked to sign for a smashed-up BMW on a low-loader at 11pm.
We’re on friendly terms with the mechanic – he has parking spaces we sometimes borrow – so it’s in a spirit of neighbourly diplomacy that I walk round to his premises with the two shock absorbers I found leaning against my front door when I arrived home on Friday afternoon.
“I was just thinking of ringing your bell,” he says.
“I don’t know how long they’ve been there,” I say.
We chat for a bit about the weather, pausing while someone inside uses an angle grinder.
“So,” he says. “I see you’ve got an electric car now.”
“Yeah,” I say.
“How’s that working out for you?”
I hesitate, because I know he probably doesn’t want my full answer. The problem, I explain anyway, is not the car – I like the car – but the fast charging point that still hasn’t been installed on my drive.
“You can’t just use a regular plug?” he says.
“You can,” I say, “but then a full charge takes 36 hours.”
“OK,” he says, in a tone that does not suggest he can’t wait to hear more.
The electrician who came to install the charger, I explain anyway, fell into immediate despair on seeing the proposed route between the fuse box and the installation site. After some passive-aggressive wheedling on my part, he reluctantly agreed to help me lift some floorboards to run the cable. Only then did he inform me I needed remedial electrical work done – bonding, he called it – before he could continue. Then he left.
“Sounds crazy,” says the mechanic, his voice carefully stripped of encouragement.
It took three days, I continue anyway, to negotiate a price for the bonding, and another three to secure a second appointment. I changed my plans to ensure I would be home on the day, only for the appointment to be suddenly postponed for a further week, to a date in the middle of my holiday. Finally, with very little remaining goodwill on my part, a fourth installation date was agreed upon.
“And that date,” I say, “is next Monday. It’s taken two months so far.”
“Well, good luck with it,” says the mechanic, waving me off with a raised shock absorber.
That evening a new electrician rings to confirm our Monday appointment. He adds that he’s very concerned about the proposed cable route from the fuse box to the installation site.
“The cable’s already laid,” I tell him. “The other guy did it.”
“What other guy?” he says.
“You don’t know about the other guy?” I say. “Do you know about the bonding?”
“It’s not on my worksheet,” he says.
“I have a story to tell you,” I say. “A long story.”
At 8am on Monday my wife lets the new electrician in, and promptly leaves with the dog. Once he’s examined the fuse box, I show him where the laid cable runs – under the living room floor, out through the wall and along the side of the house – and wait for him to tell me what’s wrong with it.
“No, that’s fine,” he says.
“What about the bonding?” I say.
“You don’t need bonding,” he says. “I tested it, and it’s all working.”
“I don’t need bonding?” I say.
When my wife comes home an hour later the electrician is gone, and the charging point is installed. I show her how to control it via the app.
“How do I get the app?” she says.
“I don’t know, he did it for me,” I say. “In, like, 10 seconds.” My phone pings in my hand: an automated message from the charger company, saying that a qualified electrician will be arriving that afternoon.
“Christ,” I say.
When the doorbell rings at five I’m half expecting a third electrician with no knowledge of the previous two, but it’s just a delivery driver holding an intake manifold.
