Most towns throw up a scatter of unrelated faults. Telford throws up clusters, and once you know why, it stops being a coincidence.
The pattern. A New Town estate goes up in the late seventies. Twenty years later the original timber doors get swapped for uPVC, and because the whole street does it within a few years of each other, every house ends up with a multi-point gearbox of roughly the same age. A gearbox is a mechanical part with a working life measured in tens of thousands of cycles. They do not fail on the same day, but they fail in the same window.
What it looks like on the doorstep. First the door needs a firmer lift on the handle. Then it needs a shove. Then one morning the handle goes all the way up and nothing throws, and the door will not lock at all. People tend to ring at the last stage, which is the expensive stage, because by then it is often an emergency rather than a booked job.
What I actually do about it. If I am already on a Telford street for one of these, I will say plainly that the neighbours are on the same clock. Not as a sales line: a gearbox swap booked in daylight is from £145, and the identical job at 11pm because the door has finally given up is from £170. The part is the same. The difference is entirely whether you rang me before or after it stranded you.
