Incompetence par excellence

I have a confession. I am somewhat arithmetically challenged. I'm not proud of it but it's a fact. I always hated those school problems where you had to measure the area of a given chunk of land or wall or whatever and then remove corners and things. Which is why I wisely didn't choose a career in surveying or building but stuck to English Literature and writing where you can make up your answers as you go along as long as you argue them convincingly and still get good marks and a big tick if you're lucky.

So . . . you would think, wouldn't you, that a company that specialisies in constructing bespoke conservatories to the highest standards would get their sums right. Right?

Wrong.

Having been provide at great expense (ours, of course) a detailed and accurate plan from the architects and having vsited the site on, not one, but two separate occasions to take measurements, you would think that the man with the tape measure would, prior to calculating the length of the roof would have measured the height of the proposed conservatory from the concrete floor level and not the top of the stone wall. (I think it may have something to do with angles and areas and maybe even trigonometry, but don't quote me.) But no. Although the walls that were measured correctly are now in place, there were red faces all round when they came to putting the roof on. To comply with the planning people, we have to have a straightforward sloping roof. This is attached the conservatory wall just below the gutters on the chapel itself down to the horizontal wooden bar above the conservatory windows. Only they didn't. The roof piece wasn't long enough because of the wrong height measurement.

Even I wouldn't have made that mistake. At least, not if I'd paid attention in Mr Moody's lessons.

As a result the conservatory installers have packed up and gone back to their workshop to make a new roof and will not return for another two weeks. We can only pray they measured it correctly this time.

Maybe I should have been a builder after all. It certainly pays better than writing.