Blatant Industrial Espionage

This morning I received a call from a customer, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, where I'm not sure what he hoped to accomplish but he wasn't getting any cooperation from me regardless.

He needed some cables repaired and I told him to bring them in Monday or Tuesday but expect a two week return time because we're busy. "Why don't you teach me how to do repairs, Cosgriff? I might could help you out."

"I'm don't know that I can do that, Cloyce. I'd have to stay right with you at first and it would really just slow me down." Let me establish, quite bluntly, you don't want Cloyce fixing your stuff. Trust me.

"Well let me ask you this: what does it cost you to fix a cable? What's your actual cost?" 

I have to admit that I was a bit taken aback by such a question. It's, oh, what would you call it, impertinent, maybe? Still, it was Cloyce, something of a dingbat, and I held my temper. My response was rather pointed nonetheless. "I'm afraid that's privileged information, Cloyce."

He responded indignantly, "Man, you just don't want any competition do you, Cosgriff?"

Well, I won't lie. I don't really want competition, no. But I would accept it if it arose naturally because that's part of the working world. And it occurs to me this second that Cloyce competition might actually help me in the long run, once folks see what kind of work he does. Still, I ain't helping anyone learn to compete with me, and I'm especially not telling him my margins. What did he expect?

We'll see if he brings his cables by.

All Wrong

When me Pops was trying to get his drain snake repair business off the ground he was willing to go above and beyond the call of duty, to show customers he was serious and, hopefully, have good word spread around fishing for more. But you better not have taken advantage of that.

One former customer, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, called around 8:30 on a Saturday night asking if Dad could meet him at 8 Sunday morning for a machine repair. Pops reluctantly said yes. As I said, he was trying to get set up and wanted to show goodwill and effort.

Dad was at the old barn at 7:45. Cloyce wasn't there at 8.

Or 8:15.

Or 8:30.

When he still wasn't there by 8:45 Dad went home. At the time he liked to go to 9:30 Sunday Mass at old St. Dominic and needed time to get ready.

At 9 there was a loud knocking at the front door of the house. It was Cloyce, demanding, "Where you been Bill? I been waiting at your Shop for an hour!" 

Now, me Pops was generally mild mannered. But Cloyce went and said the wrong thing to the wrong man at the wrong time. The old man let him have it. 

And now you know why I said former customer a few lines back.

Cloyce the Engineer

There was this drain snake customer of ours, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who might have been the penultimate re-inventor of the wheel. There wasn't a drain snake which was safe from his passion to do things different under the guise of making them better, which to my knowledge he never actually managed. His improvements tended to make things harder rather than easier.

Ol' Cloyce had a large plate installed atop a snake to turn the motor a hundred and eighty degrees around because it would then magically give the machine more power. It didn't, but it sure made working on the motor a greater chore. 

He welded the power feed onto a machine, backwards too by the way, because that made it easier (he argued) to access the actuator handle. Not in the least, I tell you, but replacing bearings was then a true challenge because you had to take the entire feed apart to do it. Normally you take the unit off and set it on a work bench where, trust me, putting in new bearings was much more readily done. 

Perhaps his greatest accomplishment was retrofitting a thirteen horsepower gasoline engine to his electric drain machine because he was absolutely going to destroy any root bed in any sewer which came his way. Those roots would never know what hit them. 

There wasn't simply one thing wrong with that approach. There were many.

A typical electric snake has a 3/4 horsepower motor. Cloyce increased the power nearly twenty times the necessary strength. Overkill much, Cloyce?

Then the unit was too heavy and bulky to get into a standard basement in a private home. But that was probably just as well because, you know, toxic fumes from the exhaust just might be a problem in a small enclosed area. Maybe.

Professor Cloyce took care of that with an intricate series of detachable piping which could be run from an open basement window to the drain access. Of course, that put you as much as forty or fifty feet away from the job and left you blind to the work. I guess progress doesn't absolutely require that you see what you're doing, but still.

I'm sure he did rip those roots to shreds. I'm sure he destroyed a good many lengths of sewer pipe too. Ah well. Here's to Cloyce, the Thomas Edison of the snake world.

Or more honestly, the Rube Goldberg. But I'm sure the old boy had fun tinkering in his laboratory. Uh, garage.