On the tiles

As preparing the shop in Xalo (Hullo?) is the top priority, my first job has been tiling the food preparation counter in the shop. As the building has poor ventilation and the small extractor fan vents to a communal flue, nobody is allowed to cook on the premises. Fortunately, the delicacy to be sold here doen't need cooking so "food preparation" means making sushimi - the cloggies favourite snack of raw Herring. Can't wait.

We have been sustained in our work by the dulcet tones of the "singing bartender" Andre Hazes singing songs about failed relationships in a late 50's style, (think Edith Piaf singing Country in low German) - a genre called levenslied ("song about life") - This is so attractive to Rob that his CD player is set on 'repeat'. Oh joy! Andre apparently lived an unhappy, alcohol fuelled life and is now deceased. Perhaps he llistened to one of his own recordings.

Two young Lithuanian boys drove a semi-trailer from Holland with 3 pallets of stock. Regrettably the silly truckers at HQ had not seen the need to replace the control cable for the rear hoist, so we were forced to unload everything on the truck and to ferry the boxes 30m into the store on wheel-barrows. Took a couple of hours while we were all nervously watching out for the Policia Locale or even worse, the Guardia Civil, in case they disapproved of a TIR lorry treating a bus stop as an unloading bay. The narrow streets of Xalon do not lend themselves to international transport operations.

I've also been roped in to install the Point of Sale system, a job beyond my capabilities I fear. I can get the thermal and the label printers working but not the bar code scanner, cash box or "shopmate" software. Trying to install them on a second hand XP machine with a defective hard disk fan and drained on-board battery may be aggravating the problem.

Next job was converting an old Dutch, 3 phase bread slicer with a 4 pin plug to the more modern 5 pin Spanish supply socket. Of course, the owners could pay 150 Euros for an electrician to do the work, but I am going to do it instead. I am guessing that the original did not have a separate earth and since a 3 phase supply does not need a common return, I will simply connect the old common wire to the new earth plug. (Clue: the wire is green and yellow!). Lets hope the inspector doesn't notice!

Actually it was started in my absence and worked perfectly. No one was more amazed than I, because all the texts about wiring these motors suggested that the motor would only rotate in the correct direction if the supply wires were connected in the correct order, which it is not possible to discover by examination.

Finally I have been a plumber and fitted a new sink unit after digging the waste pipe out of the wall and lowering its exit point.

Tiler, loader, IT technician, electrician and plumber. Is there no end to this mans talent?もっと詳しく