You’ve gotta be Labour
My erstwhile colleague at The Malta Independent (she was asked to leave, and not because of her political convictions, I can assure you) has written the most ridiculous thing on her Facebook wall.
During the storm last Saturday, her ‘friend’s’ glass-topped table was swept by the wind into her swimming-pool.
The table-frame was retrieved, but she called the local council and then the Civil Protection Department to get them to fish out the glass top. Can you believe it? I couldn’t. Josanne, on the other hand, seems to think that sort of behaviour perfectly acceptable.
A debate then ensued between Josanne and her time-wasting Facebook friends on how best to pull out the damned thing now that the bastid CPD and new local council won’t do it themselves.
The general consensus was: divers and those inflatable things they use to raise stuff from the sea-bed, like precious antique cannon.
Unbelievable.
You’ve just gotta be Labour. First you try to bum personal services for free when by no stretch of the imagination can you possibly be entitled to them, and with absolutely no embarrassment about using public resources in this fashion, then when that doesn’t work out, you consider wildly impractical options without the slighest cost-benefit analysis on the back of an envelope.
Here’s what you should tell your ‘friend’ to do, Josanne, if you can find it in yourself to admit that I speak sense sometimes.
Tell her to leave the ruddy thing where it is. It’s a sheet of solid glass. Nothing’s going to happen to it. It’s not going to rot, it’s not going to break, and it’s not going to contaminate the swimming-pool water. And nobody’s going to cut themselves on it, because presumably, being a table-top, it’s got a sanded edge and it’s at the bottom of the pool anyway.
Then, when the time finally comes to clean out that pool and it’s nice and empty, tell your ‘friend’ and another couple of strong friends to climb down, lift it up and push it up and over the edge. Then they should climb out of the pool, pick it up again, and put it on the table-frame.
Meanwhile, your friend can use another table, or get a nice carpenter friend to cut a piece of heavy plywood to use temporarily. Or just get another glass top and to hell with the other one. If you think that a couple of divers and a whole set of equipment are going to be cheaper than buying that glass, you’ve just gotta be Labour.
But then maybe you can bum the divers and equipment for free. Off the Civil Protection Department. Hbieb tal-hbieb, you know…
UPDATED WITH PHYSICS AND HOUSEKEEPING LESSON
Picking up a sheet of plate glass off the bottom of a swimming-pool that’s full of water is not like picking it up off the ground. You’ve got to factor in the weight of the volume of water on top of it, which exerts downward pressure. This makes it ‘heavier’ to raise if it’s flat side up, because the pressure of the water is exerted over a larger area of flat glass.
The glass has to be raised in an upright position – so no flotation devices as suggested by Ms Cassar’s correspondents – or it is likely to crack under the downward pressure. Tilting it from flat side down to an upright position has all the risks and difficulties associated with the downward force of the water’s weight.
So if the glass is so precious, empty the pool. If it costs more to empty and refill the pool than to buy a new sheet of glass, just buy a new sheet of glass.
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A plan so cunning you can fix a tail on it and call it a fox. Still waiting to hear how Joseph taghna is going to reduce our electricity bills. I’m sure his team concocted an ingenious plan that’s going to leave us speechless.
Silvio Parnis? I believe he fishes stuff out of watery places so should be just the guy to call. She can pay him in hair gel
I suggest she calls Jim Cameron. He’s been 5 miles down in the Mariana Trench – I’m sure he will retrieve that glass from 5 feet deep.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17289535
People like these make it all the more urgent for the Maltese gene pool to get a cold hard reboot.
Baxxter Deep-Sea Salvage Diving Co. Ltd. to the rescue!
0. Call us.
1. We’ll seal off the area.
2. We’ll inspect the poolbed, sail out to the incident area with our surface vessel, the Malta Enterprise, and carry out a hydrographic survey by sonar.
3. Then we’ll send down our deep-sea bathyscaphe, the Red October, equipped with recording equipment, more sonar, and two multiethnic seasoned divers with chiselled chins.
4. We will then decide whether to salvage the table top using our submersible robot or to send down a diver.
5. We will send down our diver, in full deep-sea diving gear. There will be tense moments and drawn faces in the red glow as we communicate via the vital telephone link in hushed tones.
6. Our diver will locate the wreck, not before being attacked by man-eating sharks and hiding from a passing North Korean attack sub beneath a giant squid.
7. There will be some technical glitch somewhere, possibly in the nitrox-thingy supply line.
8. Our second chisel-chin diver will ignore express orders from me and go down to rescue his comrade in distress, equipped only with a diving knife and tight speedos, like that chappie from Le Grand Bleu.
9. He will locate the stricken diver, and bring him to the surface. Tense faces all round once again.
10. He will get him ashore (well, your barbecue area) and attempt to give him the kiss of life, as a sexy actress, who’s someone’s girlfriend, appears out of nowhere and runs to the dying man.
11. We will get the diver, who by now is experiencing the bends, to a hyperbaric chamber flown in by one of those huge Russian helicopters, after Vladimir Putin personally intervenes.
12. I will sigh and look into the camera with a compassionate but steely look.
13. We will get a call telling us the man will live. Manly slapping of backs and Amaro Montenegro all round (please stock up).
14. Credits will roll and we will present you with your bill.
15. Since the table top is still at the bottom of the pool we will advise you to call us again.
Point 14 is rather slippery.
Replace “you” with “The Mayor” and you’ll be her hero.
I’m sure Bear Grylls will find an easier way.
Franco DEBONO might help. Ibati ftit iehor miskin, After all he is having a very rough time in parliament abusing his parliamentary immunity to attack Richard Cachia Caruana.
Hilarious. Well spotted, Daphne.
[Daphne – Somebody kind and jolly sent it to me.]
Thats a good one! You make me laugh and make me cry, too.
I might have a very simple plan how to retrieve the glass top.
First step, get Peter Calamatta Ltd to carefully uproot and retain any tress that might be bordering the pool.
Get Vassallo Builders, or any other contractor, to dig a similar pool, next to the existing one. Retain all the earth and debris.
Pump all the water from the first pool into the new one.
Now, what you have is two pools, one of woich contains the glass top.
Get somebody to lend you one of those tower cranes; there’s lots of choice if you just come to Dingli Street in Sliema.
It is now a relatively simple matter to tie up the glass top and lift it to its original place on the table, using the tower crane.
Pump the water back into the original pool, refill the second pool with the earth and debris, and replant the trees.
In this process, nobody gets wet.
I wonder how nobody thought of it.
Solution? Peter Graves of M.I.
Get Joe Grima to crawl underneath the glass top and then just let him slowly float up to the surface.
Ha nfittxek ghad-danni Anthony. Bzaqt it-te fuq il-laptop habba fik!
Or invite him and his brother to have a look and gently push them in. The splash would empty the pool and they can retrieve the damned thing as they climb out.
Prosit. Best solution to date.
Brothers Grim(a) Retrievals, Inc. Phone 0800-19711987
Didn’t Josanne’s friend think to ring Joseph Muscat? He’s ever so helpful. He might even do her shopping on the way there.
She could refuse to pay the licence, snapping the authorities into action, emptying her pool for free.
A new meaning to dining ‘al fresco’.
Depends how deep the pool is. Michelle and her Gucci silver rubber wellies might come to the rescue …
You should mark posts like this one with a clear warning: If consumed over lunch, you might choke to death.
I burst out laughing when I read what it was all about.
For Christ’s sake, the “friend” can afford a pool and not a new sheet of glass?
Very typically Labour to try to get something for free – at all costs, even at the cost of seeming really poor.
“poor” – in one’s social skills not in one’s finances.
Just too funny.
Why not call the Table Tops Busters? Tel: (+356) 2124 9900
There again you could use your head and buy or borrow a couple of vacuum cups and you would have it out in a couple of minutes.
[Daphne – Read my physics lesson.]
I don’t need a physics lesson I can assure you. If you attach two vacuum cups, these are what glaziers use to lift plate glass in case you don’t know, to one edge of the glass then with someone on each cup you lift up and to the side at the same time. Don’t tell me you think that because the glass is on the bottom of a pool it can’t be moved because of the weight of water on top?
[Daphne – It is a lot more difficult, yes. But that isn’t my point here.]
Josanne’s friend should phone 2141 5183 and ask for Carmel H.Attard. A permanent fix to the problem is guaranteed.
Why hasn’t Josanne’s friend called Silvio Parnis yet? Everyone else seems to do so.
I would think retrieving a glass table-top from a swimming-pool wouldn’t be too much trouble for somebody who rescues pills accidentally dropped by old ladies down the lavatory.
On another note, the physics lesson is flawed – the bit about the glass being heavier because of the weight of water on top of it (basic hydrodynamics). The glass will actually be about 20 to 40% lighter than if it was not under water.
If one tried to pull up the flat lying glass quickly it might break but it has nothing to do with the weight of the water on top of it.
Young Falzon is right, Daphne. The it is more difficult to shift the glass when it is lying at the bottom of the pool because there is a whole column of water pressing down upon it from above, but none from below. Same as trying to lift a card off a table. Once you lift it up an inch, the pressure on the bottom surface will equal the pressure on the top, and then it becomes a question of lifting a heavy object underwater.
But how could the table-top have ended up in the pool, catapulted there by the wind, without breaking? Is there more to this story than meets the eye? Is someone trying to wean Silvio Parnis off old grannies?
[Daphne – Roughly for the same reasons you mention, H.P. Once in the water, it shimmies gently down, cushioned by the water itself. Far more fascinating is MY table-top, which was blown off onto the flagstones (the only pool we have has got terrapins in it) and stayed in one piece. I’m thinking of starting a devotional cult.]
Hilarious, but I think this story is untrue as usually, women when faced with such a situation first they call their boyfriend to give a helping hand under disguise.
I think her only aim was to tell us that she has a friend who has a pool.
It seems you completely missed Grace Borg. The shape of her nails is ideal to retrieve the glass top.
Josanne, the glass top has sunk to the bottom of the pool because it’s three times less buoyant than fresh water.
So to to get it to float you have to make the water less buoyant than glass.
Calculate how many cubic metres of water you have in that pool. Add 100g of salt for every cubic meter of water. Then add 300g of sugar fr every cubuc meter of water.
Finally add ice cubes until the temperature of the water is brought down to 4 degrees Celsius, making it even denser than glass.
Your glass table top will then float to the surface. Then throw in one thousand tea bags per cubic metre from the shallow end and heat the water by plunging in a few radiator heaters at the deep end till boiling temperature. You now have a giant teapot as well.
Haha good one Martin!
But Daphne sorry your physics lesson is faulty, however C Falzon got in there before me and has explained it perfectly.
Unless the glass pane is perfectly sealed to the bottom – and I mean sealed, with a rubber seal – AND the existing pressure subsequently relieved, from beneath – the water pressure is applied in all directions, top and bottom (and sides) so there is no force that is pushing the glass downwards, in fact, again as C Falzon pointed out, there is buoyancy.
But “FFS” – wait till the summer and two persons with goggles will surely be able to lift it out. Gejja bis-CPD!!
“…the water pressure is applied in all directions, top and bottom (and sides) so there is no force that is pushing the glass downwards..”.
Except gravity.