I believe you must have experienced this nightmare at least once in your lifetime. It’s winter, early morning, Friday morning, alarm clock is waking you up. It’s time to get up. You wait a while and enjoy the last moments of staying under the warm duvet kissing your dreams good bye. And decision must be made - you sit on your bed. But a horrible feeling goes along your body - it’s cold! You’re freezing! You check the heater - it’s ice cold. The only thing your organizm was able to do was jumping under duvet again. But what to do next?
You can’t stay here much longer although you’d love to. Your work is waiting for you. It’s the day of completion of this important project you’d been assigned to. You can’t afford to be off. Then, you make a neck breaking effort to reach your clothes and dress up while still staying safely in bed. Done. And you go to the kitchen to make a wonderful cup of hot coffee. And there it is - a boiler. A cause of your troubles. It has a small display and only few buttons. Nothing too complicated as it may seem. A mobile has a whole keypad, so many options and even a camera, and you use it with such finesse and agility. No problem! You press “menu”, a display went light greeen, but all you can see is a number 43. Press again, and nothing happens.
You wait for a small fire sign to appear, press the other button and now the number is counting down. You wonder if it’s going to blow when it reaches 0. No, it stopped at 26. Cold water, cold heaters, at least coffee is hot. You turned the boiler off, then on - maybe it’ll help. You think that by analogy with a PC - in some magic way - heat will return. And nothing again. Then you realize it’s Friday morning. Weekend begins in few hours. You planned to read a bit, surf the internet, you simply wanted to enjoy the peace of your home and how can you do it when it’s freezing. A red alarm starts in your head. You enter the room and start looking for help. Help!!! No, screaming won’t do. You must use something more efficient. Yes! Internet! Now you bless God for creating world wide web. One of his best inventions. And luckily it’s speed is even satisfactory. You enter Google, what else, you’re looking for a plumber. Because you live in Clapham, you type in “plumbers in Clapham”. There it is! Now it’s only a matter of choice.
To choose the right one - that’s most important. You’ve heard of these - they are so expensive. And these - your friend had bad memories about them - you can’t remember exactly what it was but you prefer not to try. And you click there on clapham-plumber, well, the website looks nice and professionally, you need to try. You dial the number, not sure if you manage to succeed, you ask for someone to come asap. They’re checking… Yes, there is a chance you’ll spend this evening in warmth of your cosy room. They told you something about time slot between 4 and 6pm. You agree enthusiastically. Your flatmate will be there to let them in.
It’s 6pm, you come home and now you know. It’ll be a perfect weekend. Heaters are getting warm.
And you’re not bankrupt.