Murphy lends a hand

We are up early on Wednesday in anticipation of the Big Day when the plumber does all the internal fittings and reconnects the house to the sewer.
Tradies usually arrive about 7am, but when he hasn't arrived by 8am we think that maybe he will be later as he is bringing some heavy machinery.
By 11am it is clear he isn't coming at all. We manage to extract a phone number from a past invoice and give him a call. His story is that his notebook got soaked by a hose and was rendered unreadable. He'd managed to reconstruct most of his appointments, but he knew there was one job he'd lost, just couldn't remember which one.
You guessed it, it was ours.
The upshot is that we are now expecting it all to happen on Saturday instead. At least the major excavation work will be starting a bit later as they aren't allowed to make noise before 9am on a Saturday.
But Murphy wasn't content with one thing going wrong. Later in the morning, the Council contractors arrive to do the footpath. At least they weren't competing with the plumber's truck and digger, and we did manage to persuade them to leave the section in front of the gate as it was, unsurfaced, and to come back some time later to finish it. Murphy's law says that means we'll probably not have a surfaced footpath until about this time next year, but we can probably live with that more easily than with having a brand new one wrecked and then being asked to pay for it to be repaired.
So we are now looking at two more days of nothing happening. We may take advantage of that to get a couple of measure-and-quote jobs done for blinds and carpet while there are no other tradies there.