You must be joking!

While I'm on the topic of council antics that have annoyed me, here's one from Falkirk:

Now, to be fair, the Falkirk council have generally been pretty good. They've got a really solid recycling programme (without yet succumbing to the idiocy that is slop buckets), they somehow manage to keep the town reasonably neat and tidy, and Council Tax rates are not excessively painful.

Still...

When I got home yesterday, I found a letter from the council waiting for me. Said letter was posted on Tuesday and received on Wednesday, and declared that, due to some health and safety regulation, the council needed to urgently inspect large portions of the block in which I live.

Fair enough, right?

Well, not quite. See, in order to do this, they would require me to be available to let them in some time between the hours of 10 and 4, essentially taking up a full day for this.

But that's not the worst part. They wanted, nay needed, to do this today.

So, I was somehow expected to make myself available for an inspection at some random time today, with twelve hours of notice?

Well, sorry mister council-man, but that's not going to happen. Perhaps surprisingly, I have to work. And I'm having a hard time getting a day off work for my own use at the moment; I'm certainly not going to burn one of my few days just for you. Not to mention that it's flat impossible to do it with less than a week's notice; to achieve what they want I would have to call in sick, when I am not.