The taps on my bath are broken – I can’t switch between taps and shower at the moment, so this evening I made a trip to the Crawley branch of Sainsburys Homebase. Here is the conversation I had with the store assistant after choosing the taps that I wanted:
Me: Can you tell me if your bath taps work at mains pressure.
Shop Assistant: I’ll need to speak to someone to find out.
5 minutes later…
Shop Assistant: I’ve been told that different areas have different mains pressures, and that we wouldn’t be able to take the taps back if they leaked because of a high mains pressure.
Me: OK, can you tell what pressure these taps go up to ?
Shop Assistant: Mains pressure.
Me: Can I speak to a manager ?
Shop Assistant: No, he’s too busy.
I kid you not. You can’t make this stuff up, if I could, I would be working in comedy and not IT. Despite the comedic value, this level of customer service is pretty unaccepable I think, although sadly it’s all too common in the UK.
Homebase can kiss the £100+ that I was prepared to spend in their store this evening goodbye…
It’s strange that you differentiate between mains pressure taps and some other variety. Is it so common over there to have a water tank and taps run on gravity feed? I doubt it.
All of the taps should already be ready for mains pressure, right?
Anyway, I know your taps are actually mounted on the bathtub itself (shame) but you might still be able to try to find those really, really cool mixer taps they have these days where one side is the tap for water pressure and the other is temperature.
These things are really swish: (eg. valve tap for showers and bath tubs)
Comment by Simon — August 15, 2007 @ 1:31 pm