Riveting stuff

The Client reckons the last post and my paranoid rantings about Telecom were a bit too 'green ink and no margins', so, to avoid being profiled, this week we're back to the hard reality of living on a building site.
The garage doors are receiving their cladding in sheet steel. The Portuguese Neighbour called round to lend me his rivet gun. Despite being dressed up to the nines, he couldn't resist getting down on his hands and knees to show me the right technique and fix the first row of rivets.


The zinc coated steel matches a treat the bare concrete walls of the ground floor. As The Portuguese Neighbour leaves, probably to find a dry cleaners before facing up to his wife, I settle down to the task of drilling and riveting. My back turned to the street, and the front of the house only separated by a thin strip of land from the pavement, I can hear the conversations of everyone that passes by. The steel railings are made of 10cm blades of steel and act like vertical jalousies (Venitian blinds) in the sense that you can't see through them at an angle. Which of course means that my presence, apart from the occasional clack of the rivet gun, goes unnoticed to passers by. Mother and small child, 'Mummy mummy, isn't that the ugly house?', 'shh, yes darling that's the one'.

Voila, the ultimate accolade.