The Medway Handyman wrote:
Its been a funny old day.............

Simple small plumbing job for a regular customer, 10 year old detached
house. Not done any plumbing work there before however.

Could not find any internal stopcock anywhere. Looked in all the
obvious places, asked the neighbours where theirs were, customer
didn't know.
No problem. I'll turn of the water outside. Customer happy with
that. Found a metal access cover, lifted it to find 4 x meters & 4 x
plastic stopcocks - not a label in sight, chamber about 22" deep,
just about able to reach them when kneeling directly over the chamber.

Cunning plan. Got the customer to stand by his kitchen cold tap, went
outside & called him on the mobile. Turned off stopcock one. No joy.
Opened it again.

Stopcock two, shut off, no difference. Opened it again and to my
surprise a jet of extremely cold water at surprisingly high pressure
made contact with most of my upper body. Second surprise was to find
the top part of the bloody stopcock in my hand.

It hadn't broken, simply come undone, not a dissimilar arrangement to
a normal tap jumper.

The chamber rapidly filled with water, overflowed and soaked my knees
& lower legs, thus completing the job of 100% saturating a handyman. Huge
quantities of water are now flowing down Robin Hood Drive.

I spent the next 35 mins trying to get the bugger back into place. Local
kids found this great fun, jumping it & out of the rapidly
flowing torrent. Eventually gave up, having lost all feeling in my
right arm due to the freezing water.

Customer was surprisingly calm. I got him to call the water company
& spent the next half an hour sitting in the van, engine running &
heating on full blast, wondering just how much this was going to cost
me, and how it would affect my public liability insurance premium. I
did dry out quite a lot though.

Water board bloke turned up & spent 20 mins trying to get the stopcock
screwed back in. He couldn't manage it either. I felt better.

Eventually he removed the water meter thus lowering the pressure
significantly & managed to screw it back in, muttering & cursing
about 'poxy plastic stopcocks, always doing this'.

He then checked the other three & found two of them (the two I hadn't
yet touched) hadn't been tightened up properly either. He used a
giant basin wrench type thing to tighten them up.

He put his tools away & returned from the van. I expected a large
bill. To my surprise & delight he profusely apologised for the
inconvenience caused by the poor installation! Result!

Never boring this handyman malarkey.........

You often find that as a 'workman' rather than a member of the public, the
services people will rarely make things difficult - We chopped a gas main in
half with a mini digger last year, luckilly the main was down for being
removed anyway as it was a shop and the owner didn't want the hassle of
having gas in the flat upstairs neither.
Transco came out and put it down to a 'gardening accident' resulting in no
charge....I've witnessed similar mishaps relating to ancient electric mains,
mostly in pubs but occasionally houses and in these cases too there has
never been any charges.