I’m waiting for the plumber to arrive. It’s three weeks since I first rang the landlords, a big bureaucratic housing association, and told them my boiler had died overnight, and that I had no hot water. It was, plainly, an electrical fault, and I made sure that they inputted that information on their computer.

Four days later, the plumber came, stripped the boiler down, and said, amiably, “it’s an electrical fault”. Helpfully, he demonstrated the electrical nature of the fault to me by jumping up and sitting on my kitchen counter, inviting me to lean over his lap to get close to the boiler, and watch as he poked the circuit board, hard, with his screwdriver. It moved and sparked, unsurprisingly. I feigned wonder, but didn’t give him the satisfaction of jumping. He tut-tutted sympathetically.

He had the cockney cheeky-chappy attitude of bad porn, but, like many men whose workplace is other people’s homes, his attitude was not self-conscious. He assumed an instant intimacy with my home and possessions that was both thrilling and galling. I wondered if he liked his invasive power, got off on the frisson his presence created in other people’s lives? Or was that me? I wondered how he’d be in a single woman’s home, how different he’d be - would he be more or less arrogant? More or less charming?

He needed spare parts. He didn’t have spare parts in the van. He said they had them in the depot. I volunteered to go and get them so he could come back to install them. He looked at me as if I were mad. He said that it didn’t work like that. He’d send in his report the following morning, and Lorraine in his office would fax an order for the parts to the depot, the parts would then be checked in the depot and made ready for collection by the engineer, and then Lorraine would call Jackie in the landlords’ office, who would then ring me and book in an appointment, which usually takes two or three working days. All attempts to get the go-ahead from Jackie for my time-saving trek to the depot were futile. The system had to win.

But their system didn’t count on one of the needed spare parts not being in stock. For ten days, one part was not in stock, it was on order, it was being delivered. The fact that my boiler is the standard one in our estate of hundreds of homes didn’t seem to have the same juicy significance for anyone else as it did with me. I was building up crucial evidence in the Court of Indignant Imagination to prove incompetence beyond reasonable doubt, succumbing to my particular weakness, the megalomanic script that loops inside my head: “if only I were running the show, things would run so much better.” It’s caused me more grief than anything, I tell you.

I’ve tried every consumer complaint tactic I know, getting first names from the people in the offices, putting my requests to them as a favour, (“Would you do that for me, Lorraine/Mohammed/Lisa? That would really be very kind of you”.) I’ve been so nice that my teeth hurt. I’ve tried to bypass the central “your call is being held in a queue and will by answered as soon as possible by a customer service operator – thank you for your patience” number, by returning their calls using caller ID and asking for them by name. It worked, once. They didn’t like that. I’ve mastered the following vocal tones: exasperation, sadness, pain, faux-stoic (akin to manipulative martyr), complete self-assurance, insistence, and, a few times, good old pin-your-ears-back-and-bear-with-me fury.

But it’s pointless, for all the time I know that they have the upper hand. And they know it too. Underneath their anti-inflammatory consumer-relations-speak telephone manner there lies the calm assurance that they are keeping to their rules, the ones that keep them safe from the wild customers, like cages in a zoo. They don’t hurt, no matter how much I want them to bleed for my suffering. Their heartstrings are immune to my plucks. I make no impact on their lives, I am one of hundreds of disembodied pleading voices.

But I want to be special. Like a hostage to a kidnapper, I want them to know my name, see the whites of my eyes, so they can’t contribute personally to my cruel and inhumane treatment. I want to feel that they’ve got to know me, that they can see my plight, that they feel the shock and discomfort of me darting unwillingly into a cold shower, that they are with me every step of the way in the daily awkwardness of boiling a kettle to fill my wash-hand-basin with three inches of hot water to shave every morning, in bringing saucepans full of water to the bathroom to fill a sink with enough warm water to sponge me down.

But I am not special, in their eyes. I will get no special treatment, the system will win. For two days running, now, the plumber hasn’t turned up at the arranged time. I wish I were a Buddhist.

Power dynamics are everywhere, if we look for them. I know that my plight with no hot water is, in the greater scheme of things, a slight inconvenience at worst. That the power-struggle with the bureaucrats is my main bone of contention this month is, surely, a sign of an ordinary healthy life.

But my fury at not being able to change things, the impatience I feel while listening to electronic muzak on the phone while being held in a queue for what seems like days in order to be heard, is fractal-like. Going deeper into the same feeling, I tap into the greater, more profound impotence I feel, when I read daily about Guantanamo Bay or David Kelly or Tony Blair, or the mockery that passes for democracy in the UK and the US, in whose name so many people have died.