What life in Italy is really like.

Yesterday we had the water softener serviced. Woke up this morning to find that power in half of the house was off. It was what they annoyingly call an intermittent problem -some power points in the kitchen worked while others were dead. My first thought was that the plumbers must have disconnected something when they were servicing the water system the day before. After an urgent phone call they showed up at 7.30 but after checking they announced that it was nothing to do with them. The electricians were very good and turned up half an hour later. The first thing they did was disconnect the electricity which caused the burglar alarm to switch onto battery operation and start the sirens wailing.This in turn meant calling the burglar alarm company which unhelpfully suggested that they show up on Monday afternoon! While all this was going on an inspector from the regional government arrived to check that the new central heating boilers had been installed correctly. We now have the boiler inspector, a new burglar alarm company and ENEL the national electricity supplier at the house. I shall post an update later when we are all less frazzled.