Rhodes on flatpack, universities and a magical number for solving an energy crisis

“Need help?” boasts our electricity company's website. “You've come to the right place.” No you haven't. You've come to a place where nobody knows anything about anything and takes 20 minutes to prove it, interspersed with the sort of piped music that gives you dental cavities.

The problem? We had a power cut a few days ago which caused the storage heaters and hot water to pack up. All I wanted, I explained to the “customer service” person, was for them to re-set the off-peak timer switch. There was a long, long spell of toothache music before he returned with the advice, hot from his supervisor, that I should contact the manufacturers of the storage heaters. Ye gods and little fishes.

Thankfully, as with so many organisations, there is another helpline number, a number jealously guarded by other companies (but revealed to me by a helpful person in the leccy business) which connects you to a SWAKOS, Somebody Who Actually Knows Something. The SWAKOS not only diagnosed my fault but graded it as an emergency and had an electrician at Chateau Rhodes within the hour. It was such a useful and crisis-transforming phone number that I'm tempted to share it with you all. But I'd rather keep it to myself, thanks.

Universities UK, a sort of cheerleader organisation for varsity (“We’re the collective voice of 140 universities across the UK”) claims that “the UK has nearly a million graduate-level jobs without qualified staff filling them”. The message they hope to convey is: “Go for it, kids. Study for three or four years, get a degree, learn to talk proper and you'll find jobs a-plenty.”

However, there is another way of interpreting these figures. It is that a million “graduate level” jobs are being done perfectly well by non-graduates. You'll easily spot these people in the office. They're the ones without a £40,000 debt who have two foreign holidays a year and an impressive work record.

Flat-pack news. In my new role as grandad, I bought a self-assembly children's slide for the garden. The box contains 17 pieces of wood, 58 screws, a couple of bolts, 10 pages of instructions and a warning that it may take 90 minutes to assemble. I'm hoping to finish it before I am a great-grandfather.