Lucky Seven

Some guys, I don't know what they're thinking.

I repair drain snakes; the bulk of you know that by now. And I have been very busy lately. By my whining, the bulk of you surely know that too. Yet I do want work coming in. I figure it's good to be eternally a week or ten days behind. That way, you know there's always something to do.

Seven, they say, is a lucky number. Perhaps. But 7 drains snakes for repair at once? That happened to me one day last week.

A customer brought in 7 broken main drain machines. All at once. Then he pleads, "How quick can I get one or two back?"

"I don't know. I have to go over them to see what they need!"

"Can't you do the easy ones first?"

"I don't know what the easy ones are until I check them out!"

Lucky 7, hell.

Human Nature

Yesterday my energy bills - for electricity and gas respectively - came in. They were higher than I expected, although I expected that. There's a Yogi-ism for you to contemplate.

To be fair though, don't we always complain about what things cost or how well they work? It's certainly been a mantra for me and among family and friends for as long as I can recall.

Has it always been this way? Did the hunter-gatherers of prehistory say things like, "The sticks we use for kindling sure aren't like the sticks we used to gather." 

"When I was a boy, fires lasted a lot longer than they do now," Grandpa might have complained from his rock recliner as the family lounged around the cave. 

Just wondering.

The hell with you

Is it ever acceptable to tell a customer to go to Hell?

Yesterday a man left a machine with me for repair. That's cool. That's what I do. He even bought the part he needed. That's cool too. I only have to charge labor. He wanted a receipt (I needed him to leave it overnight). That as well is cool. I would have given him one anyway; it's a standard business practice. At that point he left.

He returned within about 90 seconds and started taking pictures of his broken machine. While I stared at him he explained, "I just did some upgrades and want to be sure I get my machine back."

That's when I thought I should tell him to go to Hell and take his machine with him.  I didn't, but if I had, would have I been wrong?

The customer is always shocked

One of the fascinating things about repairing drain cables and equipment are the the laments which I hear along the way. At times I wonder if people ever actually think about what they say.
Broken cables always just break. The operator never ever put too much pressure on it. Never ever. They were simply feeding it into the drain line and it broke. One fella even claimed, I am not making this up, that he just looked at his machine and the cable snapped. Of course, he was kinda ugly...but the point is that most cable breakages supposedly occur though absolutely no fault of the operator. Right.
A favorite of mine is the question, why did my machine break? It is often asked with incredulity. My answer is, I think, obvious. Everything is subject to break. Nothing made by human hands lasts forever. Your equipment, your cars, your refrigerator; they all break, and sometimes we just don't know why. How can you be shocked by that?
Then there's the equally incredulous, it was working and then it just stopped! Again, why are you surprised? Everything works until it doesn't. Sometimes I just sigh about it. Other times I blog about it. Today is your lucky day.