Day 343 - Feathering our Nest

Fortunately, the weather was most uninviting today as I had to be home... I had two appointments for some technical work to be done at home and there was a huge contrast between the service being offered.  One, the large corporation, had informed me that the engineer would be coming at some point between "8 pm and 5 pm", while the other, much more of a one man band, ha committed to arriving at 3 pm.

I was somewhat surprised that the man from Sky TV did not in fact text earlier to say what time he was due to arrive, though to be fair, mid morning, I did re-check my appointment online and find that he had narrowed his arrival window to 2-4 pm.  And it was pretty close to 2 pm that he rolled up. He was a pleasant guy and it took him about 30 mins to check the offending connections, restore the box to factory settings and get us back online. I was slightly irritated that not more work was required as we have had constant problems with this piece of kit but shall cross my fingers and hope that he has mended it for good.

At the end of his visit, my second engineer called to advise me that his previous job had taken much longer than he had expected and that he wouldn't be with me until 4:30 pm.  Hmm.. this could be a problem as I am due at the Club tonight at 7 for a Club Committee meeting...

Liviu (it turned out that he was of Romanian extraction) arrived at the allotted time and set to work. He was here to install a new electronic thermostat to control the central heating and water boiler. It is a piece of technology that i have been looking at for a while and the new generation of the Nest system seems to give me waht I was looking for: the ability to activate the systems remotely from PC or phone as well as a smart thermostat that will learn how we we like to operate our heating and adapt accordingly.  We hall see....!

I had a good chat with Liviu though who personifies everything you read about the hard-working Eastern European immigrant: he was a young man who had been trained at home and has set his own business up here as an accredited Nest installer. He was charming and very efficient - made himself available for any problems if I needed further; he was relaxed about the fact that in was in a hurry and couldn't pay him on the spot: an electronic transfer tomorrow was fine, though he would have welcomed a few more minutes to discuss my Tesla a bit more...!

Off to the Club for my final Club Committee meeting as Chairman: a strange feeling and maybe for the first time, I realised that this role is actually coming to its end: it'll be weird next time to be at one of these meetings as "just" a member of the Committee...