Not the Gas Man Again (Cecilia Peartree)

Ever since I first heard it, the Flanders and Swann song entitled 'The Gas Man Cometh' has struck a chord with me and I've found myself applying it to all kinds of situations. 

For anyone who doesn't yet know it, the lyrics are here: https://genius.com/Flanders-and-swann-the-gas-man-cometh-lyrics

(for some reason the live link doesn't always work but if you are really keen to see the lyrics then you can always copy it into the search bar)

The first time I found it relevant was when we had someone from British Telecom round to install a second telephone line. Yes, this was some time ago when we still had landlines. In this case we needed it because my husband had complained to his then employers, who were in fact British Telecom, that I had had to go downstairs to answer the phone in the middle of the night when alone in the house with a small baby only to find that nobody in the family had died after all, but that my husband, who was in fact away from home on a residential course at the time, was urgently needed at work. 

Anyway, while installing the extra phone line the engineer managed to cut through the burglar alarm cable, setting off the alarm. This meant calling the alarm company to come and stop it going off, as it was driving the cats mad as well as probably the neighbours and anyone who happened to walk past. The British Telecom man stuck around to explain it all, so for once it was all resolved that same day. Fortunately the burglar alarm man didn't then cut off our electricity supply or anything, so the link to the Flanders and Swann song is a little tenuous.

Autumn Blanket

I am sure this kind of situation must have cropped up at work over the years, since in my sort-of-chosen career as a database manager any upgrade to the system always had some unwanted knock-on effects, but I seem to have blotted these incidents out of my mind, along with almost everything else that I did at work apart from the handful of conferences I went to over the years.

The next time I remembered the song was after I had plunged off a wall a couple of years ago and broken my hip. I think almost everyone of about my age who has spent over a week in hospital will be found to have more wrong with them than they thought they had - or maybe that's just me. In the case of the broken hip their follow-up investigations led the professionals to suspect osteoporosis, which turned out not to be the case, and then a possible faulty heart valve, which was sadly true. Of course that time there wasn't actually a causal link between the broken hip and the heart valve, so the gas man analogy didn't entirely work.

However, it was when I returned to the operating theatre not long ago that the analogy really came into its own, because the operation to replace the heart valve somehow resulted in damage to my lungs, and the damage to my lungs resulted in a recurrence of the asthma that had been mostly under control since about 1983, and goodness knows what will come next. Anyway, my message here is definitely 'Beware of the gas* man.'

*For non-UK dwellers, he was somebody who deals with domestic heating supplies and not petrol.