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I Hate Plumbing

Posted by Mark | Filed under Life

With apolo­gies to Cole Porter…

I hate plumb­ing in the spring time,
I hate plumb­ing in the fall,
I hate plumb­ing in the win­ter, when it driz­zles,
I hate plum­ing in the sum­mer, when it siz­zles.
I hate plumb­ing every moment,
Every moment of the year,
I hate plumb­ing,
Why, oh why, do I hate plumb­ing,
Because my leaky, f’ing faucet is near.

That bit of dri­vel is meant to pre­pare you for some whin­ing and rant­ing on my part regard­ing the lat­est install­ment in our plumb­ing adven­tures. This after­noon I worked from home as I received a phone call that the plumber had the replace­ment part he needed and would be com­ing by. The plumber showed up slightly later than I was expect­ing, but once he arrived I showed him the tub and the shut­off valve in the base­ment¹. I left him to his work and got back to mine.

The han­dle on the shut­off valve was old/rusted and back when the first plumber came out for the bro­ken faucet; he broke the han­dle (but not the valve thank god). Today’s plumber went back to his truck to get some chan­nel locks to turn it with and also found a new han­dle sit­ting loose in the truck which he said he’d try putting on². Then he went back to the bath­room and got to work. A few min­utes later I heard him exclaim “SHIT!” I asked if every­thing was ok, but got no reply. I could still hear him mov­ing about, so I fig­ured he’d just bonked his hand and went back to work.

Shortly there after, he came out and asked if I was sure the faucet was a Price Pfis­ter? I said no, that’s just what the other plumber had told us. He said in any case the part the first plumber told us to order was the wrong part and in fact it’s not even a part for the same brand of faucet as we have. He left then to see if he could track down the part we actu­ally needed some­where around town.

When he got back, he had the bad news that nobody has the part we need locally and we’ll need to order it.

[INSERT EXPLETIVE]

He also asks a few more ques­tions about the other plumber who’d been out and rec­om­mends call­ing them back to try get­ting our money refunded. Appar­ently he used to work for that com­pany and still knows a few things about their pro­ce­dures. See­ing how it’s been almost a month, our faucet is still bro­ken, the plumber who orig­i­nally came out to look at it never wants to dis­cuss it with us; my wife thought that was a good idea.

Then he turns our water back on and goes back to his shop. Not more than 30 min­utes later, he calls back³ and gives me the details for call­ing the man­u­fac­turer of our faucet as the part which is bro­ken has a 100 year war­ranty on it. My wife gives them a call. She imme­di­ately gets through to an actual human being, who takes our address and say it’ll be sent out via UPS and should be in our hands by Mon­day, Tues­day at the lat­est. Time taken to com­plete the call was less than 10 minutes.

Yes, I said less than 10 min­utes. I know, we were both stunned at that too and they did not have us pay any­thing for the parts! Now that’s some seri­ously good cus­tomer ser­vice. She then called back the plumb­ing com­pany of the first guy who came out and com­plained at them for 20 min­utes straight. Unfor­tu­nately it turns out she was talk­ing to a recep­tion­ist and the shop fore­man will be call­ing back tomor­row when she’s at work. I’m going to have to field that call and it’s sched­uled for approx­i­mately the time I’m walk­ing in the door after dri­ving home.

*sigh*

I really hate plumbing.

¹ As a reminder, the tub with the bro­ken faucet has no local shut­off valve. To stop the water flow­ing, we have to shut off the water to the entire house.
² I don’t believe it fit, but it was nice of him to try.
³ Unlike the orig­i­nal plumber who appeared hat­ing call­ing us back and didn’t like us to call him either.

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