Uncivil engineering

We have no heating in our building at work. Well actually we have a boiler and radiators but they don't do anything at the moment. The radiators are those heavy cast iron things that look like whale ribs and pre-date the war and I'm not talking about the Gulf War or even the Great War, I'm talking the Crimean War. Most of the radiators have been retrofit at some point and have temperature/on/off controls on them but not the one in my office. The one in my office doesn't have such new fangled niceties, you have to turn mine on or off with a spanner.

Of course being a government building the central heating goes on and off on specific days of the year regardless of the outside weather conditions and earlier this year come about May, it was sweltering outside but the heat was still on so I had to do my magic with the monkey wrench. Either that or bring some birch twigs to work to thrash the First Sergeant with. That's not a bad idea anyway, I'll try to remember that one.

So, this year when October the 16th rolled around it had already been pretty cold so I was glad to be able to crank that err not-quite-a-knob and get some heat coming through. Unfortunately the water from the radiator started to ooze out of the err not-quite-a-knob thing. It seemed to settle down after a while so I just thought the system needed bleeding and had sorted itself out.

Last Monday I had to go in to work when everyone else was off enjoying a belated Veteran's Day day off. I noticed a dark patch under one of the sofas and concluded that the radiator had been leaking rather a lot more than I thought. Oops. Since I was not expecting to see anyone before my surgery I left a note for the boss and scarpered.

This week the heat isn't working at all so we had the building manager put a work order in to the Civil Engineers Squadron who manage all the estates maintenance (I'm keeping everything crossed that it hasn't gone tits up because of the leak in my office). Someone came out today to have a look. Do you know what the guy's diagnosis was?

"Uh, yeah, it's broken"

Really? Gosh. And all this time I've been twiddling my monkey wrench wondering what the problem was.