Well I sat a frichin' day yesterday waiting on the boiler engineer to come out and kick my boiler, stick a bit of duck tape on it, order some parts and tell me that he would be back on Tuesday with the parts to fix it!

Not good enough. I called them on Monday to say that my heating was a bit haywire - like coming on when it shouldn't be and not when you want it. I have boiling water (well virtually boiling) coming from the tap. The wido that I spoke to told me that the earliest that anyone could be booked was Thursday afternoon. I tried the 3 kids under 4 card but that didn't work. He suggested that I call again the next day at 8am and see if there was any cancellations.

I did this. Only for the chewing gum swinging, hair twirling biatch at the end of the line to basically tell me take a run and jump and that I was now an all day appointment for Thursday! Wait is what I will have to do then I told her and ended the call with the retort - "thanks for being so unhelpfull!" -as I used to work in telesales I am sure shew blanked it and went straight onto the next customer who was freezing their ass off in this miserable weather.

Thursday came. Still freezing, divine intervention hadn't taken place so we donned another jumper and the boys actually put their slippers on (this is a measure of how cold it was as they would run around in the snow in shorts and t-shirts given half a chance!). The all day engineer time slot we were given meant that he could call anytime between 8am and 6pm - between the lines means that you can hang around your house all day and the moron with the blue box will arrive at 5.55 to tell you that there is nothing he can do without parts.

Noon came, no engineer. I called nursery to say that J may (or may not) be depending on whether the engineer showed up soon. I would have called MIL to take him but she has a habit of throwing things back at you when you need a helping hand - another saga! But not for now.

1pm came, and went. Too late to take J to nursery so I told him and his brother to go and play in the garden, it was warmer out there after all!

4pm came, still no man in the wee blue van, so I called to make sure we were still on the jobs to do list and hadn't been bumped. I was assured that we were and that they will DEFINATELY be here by 6!

Yip, 6pm came, and went. Five past 6 I was on the phone to the breakdown call centre to complain. I was put through to the job despatch centre and told that she would call me back asap once she had found out what the problem was.

The call came, I missed it! She left a message to say that the emergency engineer was on their way and would be with us as soon as possible. 7.45 still no engineer!

Five minutes later I got a call to say that he was 5 miles away and was it still ok to come - YES!! I am not freezing my butt off for another night if I don't have to.

He was here an hour - said that we needed several parts but due to Easter holidays the earliest we could have them was Tuesday. But he said if we left the heating on then if might hold out till then.

We got 13 hours of heat.

I have now arranged for another engineer, with more duck tape to come out tomorrow and hopefully do enough to help the heating limp on till Tuesday.

Your freezing gal pal

Jen