That’s just the way things are

When we were in the UK we saw on our Italian security camera a man wearing an unidentifiable high viz uniform call at our back door, leave and come back again with something in his hand.  His car or van was obviously parked up the road so we couldn’t identify that. 

A few weeks later the same man was back, this time he again went back to his car and return with a screw driver spending time at the back door, which is where our electricity meter is housed.  We have a smart meter so there is no need for readings to be taken, besides if he wanted to just read the numbers he wouldn’t need a screw driver.  As a precaution we asked Mario to check and the house was fine.

However this time MrFF took from the camera a still of the visitor which he then sent to our provider asking if they could identify the person and explain what he was doing.  They replied, eventually, saying they couldn’t respond because MrFF had written in English, it must be a special law that utilities cannot use translator. MrFF sent everything again in Italian and this time they replied, in their own good time, that it wasn’t their department and we needed to contact the distributor.  Third time lucky, not, we got no reply at all from the distributor. 

When we arrived at our house last week MrFF discovered that the lock on the meter cupboard had been tampered with, broken and inoperable, so much for the screw driver.  Maybe it’s also a rule that keys cannot be taken out of the office.  MrFF wrote to the distributor complaining that we no longer have access to our meter and are unable to isolate our electricity supply should we need to.   In fact if the meter trips off, as often happens, we have no way to turn it back on without breaking the door open.  We got no response.

Mario arrived with our mail and there was a letter from the electricity people, dated 2 days after our complaint, saying they need to change our meter urgently and we should make an appointment.

If they’d asked us to make an appointment before the first visit and said they didn’t have a key for the cupboard that they provided we could have arranged for Mario to give them access.  Now we have no idea how the man intends to open the meter cupboard and doubt if he going to replace the lock. I know I am being too logical about this, we’ve only been back a few days and I have yet to adjust my brain into Italian mode but now as the usual senseless challenges return we really feel we’ve arrived.