Another twelve-hour day. It’s nice to feel wanted.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“Can I help you?”<\/p>\n
“Oh, yes. Do you work here?”<\/p>\n
“No, I’m a plumber.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“Now I needs me some solder.”<\/p>\n
“Right here it is; silver solder.”<\/p>\n
“Why is it silver?”<\/p>\n
(Slight pause, then assertion of confidence) “You don’t have to wear a mask when you solder with it.”<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading “They Don’t Know that They Don’t Know”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p45dxY-a","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.barleyservices.biz\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}