THE WASP MAN COMETH

The wasp man is supposed to be coming round today. Yeah, half-man; half-wasp, he is. He heard we had jellies in the fridge.

I mean the pest controller of course. We think we have a wasp nest in the eaves. In something of what she thought was a helpful move, when we told my Mum, she told us the story of the wasp’s nest they had in their kitchen years ago, which resulted in (1) a ‘massive’ hole in the ceiling, (2) the kitchen basically being abandoned like the Marie Celeste with the breakfast things still out, and (3) my Grandma being heroically stung up to her elbows, trying to block up the hole with a bit of old cardboard.

Ours is much lower grade. There are two or three wasps buzzing around the top of the bedroom window, just under the guttering. Every now and then they dart in and out of what is evidently a hole. Hopefully the wasp man can quickly deal with the little fellas before they chew their way inside.

I’m quite amazed how the flat is suddenly pushing back, now that we’ve decided to leave it. The front door lock went, the taps needed fixing, the washing machine needed replacing (with the Fancy Samsung of course) and now these tiny blighters are moving into the roof. I had five years of relatively hassle-free living, suddenly it seems it’s time for a few things to go wrong!

It’s probably just a good indication that it really is time to move on.

So the wasp man said any time between 8:00am and 12:30pm. The classic maintenance/delivery window. I wonder what the distribution of arrival times looks like? A bell curve with its peak at 10:15am? A shifted maximum between 11 and 12? Or do most people get the wasp man early? 

It should be flattish shouldn’t it? While you can’t predict how long a job might take, it should average out that the wasp man is working for the whole shift. Even if he can’t predict when he’ll get to you (due to the unpredictability of what he might have to face elsewhere) he is at least somewhere, arriving at something. The question is whether big jobs are likely to happen earlier or later, and even the wasp man can’t predict that.

What I do know is that I couldn’t do his job. My grandma on the other hand… she was evidently made of stronger stuff.