4 hours ago
2
You realised this moment was coming, right? You sensed it when you made the call in the first place, as you strove valiantly to keep the tremor out of your voice despite emitting a slight whiff of eau de mouth-breathing lunatic on the phone.
You knew it when you told work you’d be late because you had to call in the professionals after your attempt to fix the problem yourself ended with you short-circuiting your house. Also, your neighbours’ houses. And also (possibly) their neighbours’ houses. (Although you blame Bob from the Central Coast for that. His DIY videos on YouTube made it seem so easy for a home handyman to undertake building repairs with no qualifications other than a recently unearthed toolbelt and a can-do attitude.)
For a hot second, you thought everything would be OK. You spoke to someone who pledged to have an actual professional there between 7am and midday the next day (you fought the urge to retaliate for the lack of specificity by listing your address as “somewhere between Sydney and Perth”). You’ve been burned by tradie o’clock before, so you made the nice-but-slightly-startled lady on the phone swear she was telling the truth when she said someone would arrive on schedule.
Then you asked if she’d be prepared to sign (in blood, preferably) a statutory declaration attesting to that promise (hence the whole eau de mouth-breathing lunatic thing) and when she laughed and said that wouldn’t be necessary, you hung up, mollified, except not quite.
You are nothing if not an optimist. You sprang to your feet at 6am the next day, giving yourself plenty of time to shower, change, take the kids to school, and be back in time for a series of Zoom meetings (camera off, because you told your boss last time that all the Lego and baskets of dirty laundry in the background were part of a high-end abstract office art installation and she seemed sceptical).
Now it’s 4.45pm, and 48 text messages, seven impassioned phone calls and one looming restraining order later, it’s raining, you still have no power, the toilets are inexplicably backed up, and the neighbours are fixing to lynch you with your electrical tape. You can’t risk leaving the house and missing your people, though, so you’re screening calls from your children’s school, which is now threatening to put them in the care of social services. Bluff called, you tell yourself confidently. See also: collateral damage.
Meanwhile, having cut ties with the first company via a profane, borderline-deranged Google review, you’ve found a second mob that will escalate your job for the bargain price of four times what you were quoted originally. Frankly, they could demand payment in the form of your six-year-old’s left kidney, and you’d happily perform the surgery yourself.
At this point, you’re barely capable of rational thought, but it does occur to you to wonder how it is that, in an age where it’s possible to chart the course of a trans-Atlantic flight down to the nearest minute and keep digital tabs on every Uber driver in the city in the middle of peak hour, tradie o’clock is still very much a thing.
Since tradie o’clock exists in its own crazy-making realm, the only solution is to take matters into your own hands.
Once, an auto-electrician you’d called out to a job attempted to explain it to you. His opening gambit – “What you need to understand is …” – did not win him a place in your heart, especially given you had spent the guaranteed, and since expired, three-hour arrival window waiting for him to turn up. His explanation seemed to revolve around the argument that unexpected issues often crop up on individual jobs and that some customers (not you, naturally, just everyone else) exist to pester and otherwise slow him down.
“Six-hour issues?” you’d asked. “Yes,” he’d answered. “And because we do all of our auto-electrical work on a floating glacier off the coast of Greenland, we need to factor in travel time. Also, there’s no phone reception, so we can’t call or text to let you know we’re running late.” (He might not have used those exact words, but still.)
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Imagine what would happen if the rest of the world adopted the same attitude. The accountant on the phone to the tax department: “I know I promised I’d file all my clients’ tax returns on time, but I had this one guy who had heaps of cash stashed in the Cayman Islands and it’s put me behind today.”
The priest, en route to the hospital: “I’ll be there between 9am and 12pm to administer last rites, but there’s a queue for the confessional so if you could just have a quiet word to your nanna and make sure she doesn’t expire beforehand, that’d be great. And if I’m not there by 2pm, tell her to wait a bit longer.”
What can you do though, really? All the impotent rage in the world counts for naught, ultimately. Since tradie o’clock exists in its own crazy-making realm, the only solution is to take matters into your own hands. You have a spotty DIY record, a YouTube-dwelling wingman named Bob, neighbours threatening to disembowel you, and a house that’s poised to fall down around your ears.
But the one area in which you truly excel is identifying billable hours. From now on, you’ll be charging companies for every minute you’re kept waiting. Sharpen your pencil because you have an invoice to send (even if you’re writing it by a battery-powered headlamp, as the power’s still out). And the best news? There’s no question that it, at least, will arrive on time.
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