Free Life Lesson

Do you want to know why my fuse is becoming shorter and shorter? Of course you don't. But I'm going to tell you anyway.

One of the things which makes me want to go full Joe Cosgriff (my grandfather had a hair trigger temper) on people are when they want their drain snake repaired and assure me it's an easy task. To begin with (as I've said before) there ain't, and I emphatically mean there ain't, no easy repair in the present tense. They're only easy in the past tense, after you're finished, and then they were easy. Until then anything, and I mean anything, might go wrong.

So that brings me to yesterday. A guy begged me to fix his machine as he waited. "It's easy! It just needs a fitting!" he swore. I agreed to take a look at it.

He proceeds to bring me a style of drain cleaner which I have never seen before. I've been working on drain snakes for over 50 years now (I'm an old man, I can use old man talk) and ain't never seen nothing like his. Clearly it was a knock off of some sort, below professional grade. It was brand new though, with a terrible kink right where the cable came out of the drum. "How much?" he asks. "Can you do it now?"

"$40. Yes, I can do that now (by initial indications it promised to be an easy job - an inexcusably hypocritical error on my part admittedly - and the old barn is so full I had nowhere to put it if he were to leave the thing). Let's pull out enough cable for me to work with and go from there."

Try as we might, the cable would not budge. "It's tied up inside the drum," I said with the experience of a man who has seen many cables tied up inside many drums. 

"It can't be!" the customer exclaimed. "We just had it all the way out of the barrel!"

I wanted to yell, liar! I wanted to ask, how stupid do you think I am? (Quiet, Ron). I wanted to scream, You brought this monstrosity, this offense against God and man, here because you can't fix it, and now you're questioning my judgment? Instead I offered, "We can take it apart and see what we find." I wanted to get that thing outta there, but I also wanted to show him what he was up against.

Fortunately, there are basic design styles across the world of drain snakes. I was able to determine how to get the drum apart. To my surprise (that's sarcasm) there was a Gordian knot of steel cable within it. "You just had this all the way out?" I asked the man. His small smile was sheepish.

To cut to the chase, we eventually untangled and repaired the cable, reassembling the machine along the way. It took two and a half hours in all. "What do I owe you, Cosgriff?"

"$200."

"Two hundred dollars!" he responded in shock. I know he was thinking of that forty dollar initial quote.

"Yep. That cheap because I'm giving the lesson on easy fixes free."

To his credit, he grinned and paid me $200. I hope, but doubt, he learned the lesson.