BRITISH GAS WINTER HEROES STORY 1 – MARTIN
Martin Rennie I'm a Service Technician for Scottish Gas
Business. I cover Aberdeen right up to the north of Scotland. Conditions last year were
really horrendous. I was doing an awful lot of hours to try and get round everybody, to
try and keep everybody operational. It just takes ages to get anywhere, it's just a nightmare.
The call I got was to Gordon's Restaurant out in Braemar.
Chris Bruce The boiler actually broke down. There were
no snow ploughs going around, the roads weren't getting cleared and it just got dramatically
worse and worse. I'm sure it went down to minus 18 at one point.
Martin Rennie You couldn't see nothing. You were just really
going at 10 miles an hour most of the way, all the way out and really slippery. And you've
got cars abandoned places. I thought I'd phone the customer just to say where I was and try
and keep him informed. I did find it quite stressful and quite hard going at times.
Chris Bruce It was a terrible time as far as our point
of view goes. We just have to close. You end up paying your staff for nothing because you've
got no money coming in but you've still got to pay them. And you're no longer providing
a service for the village either.
Martin Rennie The repercussions are sometimes really quite
severe. If it's a care home, you have to move all the people that stay in the care home.
Hotels, they have to try and find alternative accommodation for them. So you have to be
on your game.
Chris Bruce My obvious first instinct is the whole place
freezing. Because if it freezes, then it's probably a few weeks for it to thaw out. So
it's important to get the boiler back up and running almost the same day as it breaks down.
Martin Rennie I cleared it and the boiler fired up and I
waited with the client to make sure everything was warming up.
Chris Bruce Not a lot of people would have done that,
they would have thought, I'll just go home. I'll go back tomorrow when it's better weather.
But, no, he bottled up here and that'll stick in your mind for years to come because you'll
always think, well, he made it here.
Martin Rennie It's not just a boiler or a premises, it's
a person.
Chris Bruce If you don't have people like that you can
rely on, you might as well forget about it, you might as well close for the winter.
