Gomenspeak

This morning we received a nice letter from the local water authority (who I shall call Babas, which is not their actual name but close enough).

It says that they are replacing our water meter with nice new orange ones because they think the old red ones are giving faulty readings.

They also very kindly informed us that it would take less than 15 minutes to do the replacement.

Hullo, I thought - did someone suspect us stealing water?

Then I started thinking, Hey! These are cousins of civil servants!

Everyone knows they say one thing and mean another. Right?

RIGHT!!!!

This was what I found out ...

1. Mine was not the only water meter being replaced. Everyone in the neighbourhood was affected and ...

2. The mains water supply had to be turned off to allow them to carry out the work.

Whoa!

Now, there are exactly 227 water meters in my neighbourhood and if it takes 15 mins to do one plus another 5 mins to walk to the next one, that means a whopping total of 75 hours to complete the job.

Ah ... of course they know one team can't do it by themselves. They must have sent enough teams to finish within the day, right?

Fat chance ...

I don't know exactly how many teams they sent to do this job but as at 9.30pm, a full 13 hours after they started, the main water supply has yet to be re-connected.

Obviously we were supposed to make do without the main water supply for the whole day.

And of course they know this. Surely they're not idiots there at their planning offices, right?

So why didn't they tell us that?

Is it against some Standing Order or something?

Or was it simply because there was no one there who could actually count?