Finding a Plumber

Finding a Plumber ©

By Michael Casey

As we all know a good plumber is worth more than Gold itself, and the prices they charge are of that order too. Last week we heard a drip drip drip but could not discover the origin, we went outside to put something in the bins and all was revealed, the overflow of water was coming from the upstairs central heating feeder tank. So now all we had to do was find a plumber. But hang on our central heating was covered by insurance, or so I thought.

Insurance is a strange thing, you are covered or you are not covered, it’s like your boyfriend stealing the duvet, sometimes your bum is exposed and a target, other times you are totally covered and as snug as a bug in a rug, while he shivers on a mountain ledge. So your insurance cover is like that, various degrees of coverage or exposure. So joyfully I rung my insurance company, I assumed I had total coverage, only it turned out my bum was exposed, and no joyful target for my wife, it was exposed and not covered by my insurance company.

 In plain English, my new boiler was covered by my boiler insurance, but my header tanker and its float, they could have been on the Moon. They were not covered, but the insurance company could cover them, if I had them fixed first. As for my radiators they were not covered either, apart from my pants covering them while they dried and filled the room with steam. So now you know.

So the hunt for a plumber began, which was almost as difficult as Stanley’s quest for                 Dr Livingstone. You always go on recommendation for plumbers and builders and maybe even priests. So we got a recommendation for Peter, who  I thought was the same Peter who did my sister’s central heating. Only it wasn’t, it was cool West Indian lad, who said “later” which was supposed to be an hour later, but turned out to be never. Maybe he had something to do, but not for us. Then we had another plumber in mind, an Indian guy who’d done up several houses in the neighbourhood and fixed our kitchen gutter. He was going to do a garden gate for us as well, but the cost was too much in my opinion. So I made a garden gate myself, out of the old slats from my pine bed. As for the Indian his phone was no longer receiving calls, so option 2 had gone.

Option 3 was look online, so I found a fancy plumber and told them what I wanted, a quote for a new float in my feeder tank. They replied with an automatic email, they even had a wonderful website, telling on a ticker whose toilet had been unblocked.  Only my job was too small for them as I never heard back from them.

Time had passed and my hair had grown longer, no I hadn’t turned into Rapunzel, maybe more like the Wolfman, so I gave in to my  Shanghai wife’s nagging and went for a haircut. We are blessed with maybe 13 hairdressers where I live, half being for women and half for men. So I went to the Italian barber, only he was shut. So then I went to the Russian barber, only she was shut too. I had spotted a new Pakistani barbers while I was trying to have my haircut, so I decided to go there. He had a certificate on the wall proving he’d had some college training in hairdressing skills.

I was pleased as his hairdressing skills matched the certificate on the wall, so that was great. We got talking and he told me how his cousin encourage him to try barbering. I was about to guess what he’d done previously when he told me, taxi driver. I smiled I remembered all my taxi drivers when I’d been working at CPNEC Birmingham, we had had a great relationship, they came in fast and I got them out ever faster. Keep the customer satisfied was my policy, get our guests where they wanted to be, and keep the drivers happy too. Most of my drivers were Pakistani lads.

As my hair was cut and the years fell away I asked on impulse, do you know any plumbers? He picked up a card from the shelf in from of him, plumbers. So my quest to find a plumber had ended, in the barbers shop with my ½ price haircut. I rung the number on the card and then 2 days later the plumber arrived.

The plumber Mr J was young and strong, he needed be, as my header tank was in a strange position, it was in my bedroom about 8 feet off the floor. Mr J had to remove my mattress and part-dismantle the bed so he could get the ladder up under the tank. As I’ve still not fully recovered after my bypass and my arthritis means I cannot exert myself too much. Mr J did the business and my central heating header tank float was replaced. And my bed put back together again. All for £50 and in one hour.

I did offer him a cup of tea, he couldn’t stop, so he said maybe next time, I said I hoped I never saw him, we laughed. I wasn’t laughing the night before, some bastard had tried to break into our home, but that’s another story.