The water saga continues with a mystery
You may have been following the water situation at our house. If you have, I’ve got an update for you, but first, a brief summary (and some random photos of water):
Just before Christmas, we noticed the sterna wasn’t keeping its level, water was being lost down to a certain point, tree roots was probably the problem. Low level not only meant wasted water (it would only stay topped up for about 12 hours) but also meant a bunged-up pump as it was sucking up sediment. Told landlord, he put in a temporary plastic tank on the bathroom roof, his plumber ‘wired’ it up incorrectly and without the pump, so we only had a dribble through the taps and a shower was impossible. Symi Property Services came and corrected that, and all was well. A little later, the hot water tank was found to be leaking, again, SPS dealt with it for us. A little later still and a workman in the empty flat downstairs left for the day not realising (somehow) that water was flooding from the kitchen tap and the shower. Luckily I was able to go and see what the problem was (the front door down there doesn’t shut), and again, called SPS to help. Not that the landlord wouldn’t have done it, but frankly, I don’t trust his ‘mastoras’, I mean, who puts an in-flow feed in the bottom of a water tank?
Then, a little while ago, the pipes beneath the road broke and flooded the same downstairs kitchen, so the road was taken up, that fixed and the stones put back again. And now… Well, now there’s another horror story brewing. I was pottering around at home one day when the bell went, and there was the landlord and his ‘mastoras’ unloading another black plastic tank from the back of a truck. Horrified, I told him we didn’t need any more water complications, but he said it was for the downstairs flat and was to go on the roof of our tower. O…kay. (At least this might eventually mean that downstairs has its own water supply and meter.)
Now then. The tank sat there in our courtyard day after day, and we shoved it in a corner and got used to it. Last Friday, Neil was hanging out the washing and suddenly noticed it was no longer there. It was, somehow, up on the tower roof. The thing is, neither of us had opened the double gate and let in a mastoras or any other workman, and the gate has a security bar, so you’d need to unhook that to open both doors. I can only imagine that someone climbed in, opened the gate, took the barrel into the road and hosted it up the side of the building onto the highest roof of the property, climbed down, and exited through our courtyard after securing the gate. I don’t mind that someone climbed over the wall to get to it, what was more worrying was, how many days had we walked past where the barrel was before we realised it was gone? Anyway… Hopefully, they’ll fix a pipe from the mains to the thing and then not mess up our water when they plumb it into the supply downstairs which is intimately connected to ours. The plumbing in our house would baffle even Caractacus Potts (but luckilly, not Symi Property Services).
