Why I’ll Always Have a Job

Yesterday a customer was in a pickle. (So what else is new?) His basement had flooded and put out his gas water heater. He couldn’t light it again, no matter how long he waited. A day later he gave up, went to work, and called me for an appointment. We agreed on noon, since he’d be off for lunch at that time.

Shortly before noon he called and reported a flat tire. I went on to his neighborhood and checked on another customer, just to see how our recent flooding in Memphis had responded to my work in her basement last year. (I had installed a sump pump.) When I heard from my first customer again, I proceeded to his house and met him there.

I successfully lit his water heater on the first try. Apparently it just needed to dry out.

Between traveling, waiting, and lighting, I’d killed an hour and a half. I charged him $35. He lamented that he’d made a mistake by calling me when he didn’t really have a problem. I pointed out that he did, indeed, have a problem: he was at a dead end with no hot water and it was time to call somebody. He couldn’t know if another half-hour would solve the problem or not. It wouldn’t have been wise to go to work all day, come home in the evening, and then see if things had gotten better. Had they not, he’d have faced a choice between cold showers or calling a plumber at night!

The good thing was that he knew whom to call. Some companies would have charged him $100, and they wouldn’t have had the flexibility to meet him at just the right time.

Reverse Auctions: “Gitcher plumbing service rat cheer!”

Imagine an auction where the price gets lower with every bid. That’s called a reverse auction and they’re doing it online these days. Who’s doing the bidding? El Cheapo contractors, that’s who. They’re bidding on jobs. All the bidders keep dropping their prices until the last man standing gets the contract.

Reverse auctions have been around for quite a while, and companies like GE have claimed that it saves them a lot of money when they buy commodities. I tend to think that such real-time bidding, where price is the only factor, is fraught with peril. But what do I know? GE hasn’t offered me a six-figure salary to run their purchasing departments.

I know a little bit about plumbing prices, though. Check my web site’s “About Pricing” page. I would never get into a bidding war with another plumber over a job. Why not? Because I’m honest. I don’t quote a price to a customer because I want to see if he’ll agree to it; I quote him the price because that’s what the price is. If I’m prepared to cut the price when necessary, that means I wasn’t telling the truth the first time.

The only time I renegotiate a bid is when the customer points out to me some factors I had originally missed. I don’t mind admitting a mistake. But if I were to offer to clean a drain for $70, and a housewife should respond that plumber X had told her on the phone that he would charge $60, I would still stand by my original offer. If I lose my time and gasoline on this “free estimate,” then so be it.

Sales managers have told me that I’m nuts. Fellow-plumbers have told me the same. Our point of disagreement is over priorities. Economically they’ve got me dead to rights. Ethically, I have the upper hand. I didn’t tell her $70 because I was trying to trick her into paying ten dollars more than she needed to. I told her that because that’s the price.

Believe me, if a plumber drops the price under pressure, he’s highly capable of recovering his “lost” money by cutting corners. A reverse auction sounds like a fool’s game to me. Here are some professionals who agree.

Work Harder

I’ve discovered a variant to the 12-hour day; it’s called the 24-hour day. I just got in from working a full 24 hours. Plumbing tends to be a lot of squatting, bending, and moving around. It gets old after a while. It really gets old when you do it for 24 hours straight.

People in my condition shouldn’t write blog entries. See y’all later.

They Don’t Know that They Don’t Know

Another twelve-hour day. It’s nice to feel wanted.

At Home Depot tonight I was buying parts for the nail salon job, which I’m doing at night so that the business can keep operating in the day, and I spied a little old lady with a small piece of paper in her hand. She scanned all the shelves with an aimlessness that bespoke no acquaintance at all with the plumbing trade.

“Can I help you?”

“Oh, yes. Do you work here?”

“No, I’m a plumber.”

She looked at her little paper and told me what she was looking for: a slip nut for a 1-1/4″ j-bend. She said that she was trying to find the j-bends first, then she would look for the appropriate slip nut.

Dear reader, she would have been there for a good hour had she been allowed to persist in that method. I took her two aisles over and showed her the slip nuts. I also gave her my business card.

Sometimes the workers in such a store can be a big help. Sometimes they’re as lost as a goose in a snowstorm. The problem is that the poor customer can’t tell the difference. As I resumed picking my parts off the shelves, I overheard and enthusiastic and clueless customer rattling his desires off to a worker in orange.

“Now I needs me some solder.”

“Right here it is; silver solder.”

“Why is it silver?”

(Slight pause, then assertion of confidence) “You don’t have to wear a mask when you solder with it.”

Solder was made of lead in the old days. Environmentalism has driven the trade to use lead-free solder now in an attempt to make our drinking water a fraction of a tad safer. Contrary to this utterance from the oracle in orange, nobody ever wore a mask when he soldered with lead.

I turned to look at the unfortunate victim. He had three rolls of solder in his shopping basket. I, who run plumbing calls for a living, use about one roll every month or two.

I believe in the “Do It Yourself” philosophy, but you’d better have a plumber standing by when the project goes into the toilet (so to speak); because there’s a lot of false confidence for sale, and you just might leave the store with some if you don’t check your bag carefully.

Sunday in Plumberland

I try not to work on Sunday, and today I succeeded. Church is a good reinforcement for business ethics. Some antichurch writers claim that a morality that needs religion isn’t moral at all; instead, they say, if you don’t find your morality within yourself, you can’t get it from anything outside.

They’re missing the point. Christianity doesn’t superimpose a morality from outside. Instead, it changes the heart so that one is strengthened to do what’s right and resist what’s wrong. The Bible also informs the conscience, so that right and wrong aren’t merely a matter of opinion. Then we go to church because we are social beings and were never designed to operate in isolation. Morality isn’t just a series of decisions; it’s a continuous process of life. Christ living through us can produce a morality far preferable to one that comes from gritting the teeth and making right decisions.

Nearly all religions are actually philosophies: they try to explain life and how to be happy. Christianity is first of all history: it tells what God has done on certain occasions in order to redeem man from his ruined estate. Second: it is an experience where God’s redemptive work is made actual in your individual heart. Third comes the philosophy, which tells us what to do in response to this gracious experience.

It affects the way you do plumbing, believe it or not.

Poor Design

Yesterday I cleaned a sewer line from a basement: narrow, shallow, steep steps spiraling down through two landings.  What myopia, what idiocy, what sadism motivated plumbers to put the cleanout in the basement when it would have been as easy to put it outside?  The job wound up costing the customer $100 more that it should have.

A recent plumber had reworked some of the piping in the basement.  He glued the new cleanout plug into the cleanout, making it impossible to remove.  But the only reason to install a cleanout is so that you can remove the plug. Duh!

People gripe about charlatans in televangelism, but how many of those are operating?  A hundred?  There are many times more than that in the Memphis plumbing trade, and I suspect that it’s not a lot different in Omaha or Cincinnati.  They take the money, but they do the work poorly and it costs the customer more money down the road.

Bad Plumbing

I have to go by Code Enforcement and get approval for plans to renovate the plumbing in a nail salon owned and run by young Vietnamese folks, which is the bizop of choice for these people, it seems.  I’ve never seen plumbing this screwy.  (It was done by an American, by the way, who now cannot be found.) The water heater is connected to two little shutoff valves (“stops”) that originally fed a lavatory faucet.  It’s an electric unit; it pulls 4500 watts when it is heating water.  It has no 240v receptacle.  Oh no!  They have it plugged into a regular wall socket.  It would be the equivalent of running forty five lamps, each with a 100-watt bulb, out of one socket at your house.  How they’ve kept from burning the joint down is a mystery to me.  An electrical engineer stood by me, looking at it and shaking his head and mumbling.  It’s even a mystery to him.