Questions

It was a dark and stormy night, when he knocked on the door.
It wasn't really that stormy, I suppose.
More than a week ago I answered the knock at my door, it was an engineer-type guy, in a hard hat who straight away starts with "ok, so I'm going to hook these guys up to your water now."
Eh?
I said- 'I'm looking at you blankly, because I've no idea what you are talking about"
This prompted a rant about how the day guy was supposed to have already talked to me, not all of which I caught.
Short version - neighbours next door have a leaky water main in their basement, so have to have the water turned off and the repair guy wants to hook them up to our outside tap.
The hose is already attached to the outside tap at the front.
Now, if anybody had bothered to tell me any of this I could (and did at this point) explain that that tap, doesn't work. In the sense that no water comes out of it, which is really the only purpose of a tap, unless for some reason you like the turning on and off part, but really without water coming out even that gets old real quick.
I say all this because when I told hard het it didn't work, he required an explanation.
Where was I?
Being the nice person that I sometimes am, I suggested the outside tap at the back of the house.
The second time I suggested it, I was actually listened to.
So the hose is hooked up there instead and I'm told at least three times not to turn the water off.
A week goes by, with intermittent low water pressure. No big deal. And no update from the neighbours.
So, another dark and feckin' cold night. Same hard-hat guy back knocking at the door.
This time he all but accuses me of maliciously turning off the water.
I give him my best Paddington Bear stare and ask him why I would do that?
Suitably flustered (the Paddington Bear stare can be very effective) he tells me that the water has frozen in the tap and the only way that can have happened, even in the depths of a Canadian winter is if someone had turned off the water.
He goes away, and comes back.
Turns out next door had turned it off.
The only way to un-freeze the tap, he suggests, is to get a hair dryer to it.
He goes away again.
The tap on next door is frozen too, hardly surprising as it's -5C (23F).
Over the next 30 or so minutes he is back in my house another 3 times. The hair dryer thing will take about 15-20 minutes to work and it's clear that he expects me to do this. He and next-door-neighbour have had words and the whole deal is getting unpleasant.
Question- would any of you stand outside, in the dark and freezing night holding a hairdryer to an outside tap, (even supposing that your hairdryer reached, which it didn't, which is when I decided to give up)?

Next morning, I have no water in my house. The reason? The ouside tap is open and gushing water all over the back garden. I have no idea how long it's been unfrozen and running.
I am up earlier than usual, because of the jack-hammer at 8.30am.

Next day, today, and a second team of work men have turned up to make noise at 9am.
Road works the world over, why do a one-day job with 2 men when it can be 3 days work for 6?
They are out there now, standing around, scratching themselves, trampling all over my garden, trying to get water from the outside tap at the front.
I'm not going to tell them.
Would you?