So…what happened after I showed Steven the (Avaricious) Plumber the door? As you may recall, when I couldn’t reach my regular guy, I’d called another local plumbing outfit which sent a gent around after making me wait upwards of five hours. This character complained that the plumbing under the sink (which has worked fine since I moved into this house 11 years ago) was an out-of-code mess, could not be roto-rooted, and needed to be disassembled and reassembled to clean it out. Proposed fee: $545.
Right. Sure. So I sent that jerk on his way. Posted a query on the Facebook neighborhood group’s page. Two neighbors recommended Maloney’s Plumbing, an outfit I’d never heard of. Gave them a call. And forthwith had a new fella in here.
What. A. Difference!
The guy has got the drain working fine for the nonce. He removed the lever-operated drain plug — an invention whose appeal has always mystified me. A rubber plug I happen to have in hand works just fine and does not annoy, annoy, and annoy some more. He was honest. He was straightforward. He was astonishingly hard-working. And he was very clearly NOT trying to rip me off.
Yes, he did have to take Satan’s do-it-yourself pipework apart to do the job, and yes, it no doubt was a PITA, and yup, it took the poor guy half the afternoon. But he didn’t try to persuade the Little Old Lady that the job couldn’t be done without disassembling the entire damn bathroom and rebuilding it from the foundation up. For an entire afternoon’s work, he charged me $326.
This, as opposed to the $525 (for starters) the first guy offered up — for starters. Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! Maloney’s Plumbing has got a new customer for life…or at least for as long as they treat me fairly.
Soooo… When the dust settles from this damned tooth fiasco, first thing that happens next is I’m hiring those folks to install plumbing to code under that damn sink.
The sink in the center bathroom vanity has been running slower and slower and…slowwwerrr…and this yesterday afternoon effectively stopped up.
Called my favorite plumber with a noticeable IQ and then some. No answer. I figure he’s either gone out of town for the 112-degree August moments, or shut down his business for the duration of the plague.
Call another outfit I’ve used in the past — they’re mostly in the drain cleaning business, which, I figure, probably fills the bill.
He says he’ll get here between 8 and noon. By 10:30 I figure…hmmmm….
More hours go by: no sign of second-choice plumber.
Put up a notice on the neighborhood Facebook page asking if anyone could recommend. Forthwith a guy posts that he’s watching answers, too, because when he called HIS guy, he was told the man had died at home from covid!
Aughh! I hope his guy was not my guy! Oh, my goodness, the guy is such a sweetheart. If he croaked over from this horrid disease, that would be a serious loss to just about everyone who knows him.
***
Meanwhile, the members of the ’Hood are agonizing on Facebook over we’re going to do about Halloween. Because we live in a middle-class to affluent enclave surrounded by low-income neighborhoods, we have a fantastical parade of wonderful little kids and teenagers (and parents!) all gussied up in crazy costumes, trucked to our precincts in pickups, sedans, and small buses. This begets a gigantic block party, where everyone hauls their gear out onto the driveways and sits around partying and admiring the style show. It’s the BIGGEST hoot.
Some folks are talking about maybe an event in the park, where candy can be handed out from tables. Others have pointed out that the way things are now, everyone is outside in the open air anyway, and pretty well “social distanced.”
****
Time passes…passes…passes
Just as I’m about to pick up the phone and call one of the neighbors’ recommended plumbers: Steven the alleged plumber calls and says he had “truck issues.”
Right. Sure.
Anyhow, he’s on his way. By now, though, I have two references to outfits the neighbors say can’t be beat.
****
3:21 in the afternoon…and Steven the Plumber shows up, only 3 1/2 hours late. Or 7 1/2 hours late if you figure in his demand that I be ready to receive his majesty at any time starting at 8:00 a.m: he was supposed to appear between 8 and noon. And…it’ll be his last appearance. Got two enthusiastic referrals to other companies from the FB neighborhood page.
And if I’d had an office job that I needed to get back to, while I was waiting an extra three and a half hours for this gent to surface??? Hmmmm…
****
The guy dorks around a bit and fails to unclog the pipe, which really just needs to be briefly rotorooted, right?
THEN he calls me in and gives me this WONDERFUL song and dance, to the effect that some amateur plumber has installed a messy lash-up under the sink and he can’t get his rooter in there to clean it out, and so he will have to take the entire thing apart and rebuild it. This will cost me $545.
I say well, that’s nice, but I don’t have $545, so I’ll just have to use the sink in the other bathroom. I send him out with an offer to pay the $145 base house call fee that he and his bosses had quoted earlier.
He, apparently certain that he has the hook set, says ohhh no, he’ll collect that when he comes back next Tuesday to revamp the plumbing…he still thinks he’s invited back, I guess.
Fortunately, I DO have another bathroom sink that I can use, because I can’t afford $545 on top of thousands of dollars worth of dental work: it’ll just have to stay unfixed. Privately I think THANK YOU FACEBOOK for providing a Neighborhood FB page, whereinat after I called this outfit three people gave me the names of their most highly recommended plumbers.
Shoo him out the door and forthwith call an outfit doing business as Maloney Plumbing. It comes equipped with rave personal reviews from three of the neighbors.
They promise to show up tomorrow afternoon. And waddaya bet they get it fixed in about 30 minutes?
****
Y’know… I moved into this house in 2009. That was 11 years ago. If Satan, the previous owner, had screwed up the plumbing as baroquely as this character says — he went on and on about how bizarre it is — that sink would’ve backed up long before this. (See the baroque photo, below…) And it has NEVER backed up until now, not in over a decade.
It is true, Satan was an inveterate do-it-yourselfer. And it is true, the lash-up in the middle bathroom looks different from the lash-up in the back bathroom (which is made of stainless steel, not plastic and is much simpler in design). But the lash-up in the kitchen, which was installed by real plumbers in my hire, is FAR more complicated, all plastic, and it never plugs up.
What d’you bet this guy figured he saw an easy mark and gave me a line of bull? Now, it’s possible that the sorta double U-turn you see there may be difficult or impossible to root out. But…whyyy do I doubt this? What, really, would be involved in unscrewing the black U-shaped section and cleaning out the pipes from there?
Welp, we’ll find out tomorrow. The guy from Maloney Plumbing is coming by between 12 and 2. This should be entertaining…
So…what happened after I showed Steven the (Avaricious) Plumber the door? As you may recall, when I couldn’t reach my regular guy, I’d called another local plumbing outfit which sent a gent around after making me wait upwards of five hours. This character complained that the plumbing under the sink (which has worked fine since I moved into this house 11 years ago) was an out-of-code mess, could not be roto-rooted, and needed to be disassembled and reassembled to clean it out. Proposed fee: $545.