The World’s Most Barely Adequate Plumber

Let me say right up front that I have enormous respect for anybody who works with broken pipes, crusty toilets, clogged drains, moldy basements, spiders, cobwebs, and septic tanks.

Like, for example, my plumber Phil.

I say “my” plumber because he’s the guy my landlord calls when anything starts spurting, clogging, or smelling like ripe sewage. Living in a 110 year old converted stone barn, this happens about as often as the moon turns full.

Phil is a tall, lanky, good looking fellow, with a deep, sonorous voice, longish hair, and one earring. I’d guess he’s in his early 60s. He’s well-spoken, engaging, and takes a genuine interest in the lives of me and my landlord. In short, he’s a nice guy and I like him.

I like him in spite of the fact that I think of him as the world’s most barely adequate plumber.

Let me explain.

My kitchen has — I don’t know the technical, plumbing, kitchen-designer term for it — a triple sink. It’s a large piece of steel with three basins. The middle one has the disposal in it and the ones on either side have drains. When the faucet stopped “running” (a plumbing term), Phil came over, chatted with me for awhile, looked at the faucet, and decided it was ready for the place old faucets go to die and recycle their atoms as rust.

Off he went to the faucet store, or wherever plumbers go to get new stuff. He brought back a new one and installed it while I was gone. (That’s another good thing about Phil. You can trust him not to steal your lottery tickets or break your guitar strings when you’re not there.) It’s a nice, new, sleek, chrome, 4-on-the-floor, super-turbocharged, ultra-modern faucet. Looks great. Works great. With one minor problem. It only reaches the middle sink. The other two sinks might as well be in Death Valley for all the water they get. You’d think Phil might have noticed that.

He also replaced a leaky bathroom faucet with a new, “simpler model” that he said would last forever. It does work fine, if you have the reflexes of Superman. After about five seconds it starts turning itself off like it’s running out of willpower. (If this faucet were a human male, it would need FloMax or Viagra.) So to wash your hands, you have to turn it on full blast, dodge the water ricocheting at your crotch and belly button, then wash fast.

When my hot water heater, which runs on “environmentally responsible clean natural gas,” finally bit the dust, Phil replaced it with a new, super-efficient, “green energy” model. My gas bill immediately doubled.

The toilets are an epic story. I have two, each with distinct personalities, and neither has ever worked properly. By “properly,” I mean flushing down your basic human poop. At least without a lot of extra work. Toilet One – Dopey – flushes okay, but always runs afterward. So you have to jiggle it, and with exactly the right touch, or the delicate inner workings will “break.” (Another technical term.)

Toilet Two – Grumpy – refuses to do its job with just one flush. It demands two or three to fully digest what I’ve digested. Since Grumpy is the one my guests use, reminding them to flush three times! is awkward. And embarrassing for everybody when I forget to mention it.

Phil has worked on these toilets at least five times in 16 years. Recently I called him again, and this time he decided they needed to be rebuilt. “Rebuilt” is a technical plumbing term for replacing all the funny looking metal and rubber parts inside the tank behind the bowl. (“Bowl” is a technical term for the part you sit on.) He replaced the complicated inner workings and — finally! — Dopey works perfectly. Grumpy, however, true to his nature, still needs an extra flush.

Evidently Phil also installed an added bonus feature. When engaged, the rebuilt toilets emit a sound similar in pitch, tone, and volume to a jet aircraft engine. You can hear it outdoors through the foot-thick stone walls. Now whenever I answer the call of nature, my neighbors look to the sky for an impending plane crash.

Last spring a bathroom sink was draining slowly. I called Phil. To my surprise he announced, “I don’t really do drains.” I thought this was kind of like a piano player saying “I don’t really play that white key in the middle,” and I said so. Phil sheepishly agreed to look at it, and did manage to get it back to it’s full draining capacity. For a few weeks.

As I said, Phil is a good guy. He reminds me of our plumber when I was a kid, Hinrich. Hinrich was a German who always wore freshly laundered pinstriped overalls, talked like a Mercedes engineer, and gave you the impression that your plumbing was the most important thing in the world and that only he could fix it.

My dad loved this guy, partly because of his German approach, and partly because my parents always ran into him at the symphony. (Dad took Mom to the symphony; she let him play golf on Saturdays. Successful marriage requires negotiation.) I have no idea if Hinrich was a good plumber, but my dad used him for decades because Dad loved telling people he “ran into his plumber at the symphony.”

Phil wears jeans and a work shirt, but his kids go to out-of-state colleges, and he takes nice vacations. I haven’t checked him out on internet review sites, but I think Phil does pretty well for himself. And I think it’s because, like Hinrich, he lets you know he cares about your plumbing and about you as a person. It fits with my philosophy that we’ll put up with a lot of stuff that doesn’t work exactly right all the time if people are friendly, care about us, and make us feel good.

© 2010 Greg Tamblyn