But Still

I have this one customer, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who is annoying in small ways. Many small ways. He never does anything so bad as to allow me a reason to throw him out of the Shop bodily. That's an aggravation by itself; you almost want the guy to become outlandish and obnoxious enough that you can tell him to go hell. I'm sure you have such a friend too. Quiet Ron.

Cloyce likes to do things such as inspect my work every time I do it. Every. Single. Time. On the one hand, I get it. A fella wants assurance that the thing he's about to pay for is done well and proper. On the other, he's watched me do stuff for 45 years (cue old guy stating emphatically, and perhaps angrily offended, 'I been doin' this for well on 45 years now') and I feel he ought to trust my abilities at this point.

The other day as I finished welding a fitting onto his drain snake cable he asked upon inspection, "You sure that's enough weld on there, Marty?"

What to do, what to say? "Here's the welding lead, Cloyce. How 'bout, rather than me doing it and charging you $40, you show me how it's done and I'll pay you forty bucks?" Or, "It's just like I've done it for the 45 years you've known me Cloyce. What's yer problem?" 

But still, why get mad? He's going to act the same damn way next time, ain't he?

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.

Using a Cheater

You're about to learn something about drain snake repair, but I'm sure it's a lesson which can be equitably applied to any and all repairs, whether at work or in the household.

The SC-10-A drive shaft on an Electric Eel Model C is held in place with (2) 5/16 allen screws. Most of the time they come loose fairly easily. Yet as all things made by human hands, things don't always go according to plan. In the case of these screws, they sometimes seize. They insolently will not come out. When that happens you either heat them with a torch in an attempt to coax them out, or do what I do. Put a length of pipe over the top of the allen wrench, a 'cheater' as me Pops taught me, to give you greater leverage turning the wrench.

Now, I know there is a school of thought that you should never ever, ever use a cheater bar. Well, me Grandpa Joe and me Pops both believed in them, so I believe in them. So there.

Anyways, you turn the wrench with the cheater, increasing pressure as you go, and one of three things will happen. You will either (A) break the allen wrench, (B) strip the allen head on the screw, or (C) you will hear a tiny but sharp little 'ting' exactly as the wrench turns suddenly. That ting is either good or bad. But usually, it's good. Usually it means that screw has broken loose and you are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. Your job will soon be over.

The good bad ting. Listen for it when you do your own repairs. And don't be afraid to use a cheater.

Laying the money down

They're always in a hurry until it's time to lay the money down. That's an old saw of me Pops, and it holds true as much now as whenever he first said it. Yet it still amazes me that it happens, that people will hold off on paying for things which, theoretically at least, pay for their living, their food and trucks and houses and such.

For larger projects and orders, except from well established customers, we get significant down payments. Even then, with as much as half down, we'll have folks leave things hanging for weeks, or even months. Yet there are repairs which we simply do and trust that they guy will return. Generally that involves things which we can easily sell to someone else if it comes down to it.

A good example is repaired sectional drain cables. If a fella doesn't return after awhile we just sell them. I won't bore you with the details, but we can make it up to the original customer if it comes down to it. Why, I would even honor our oldest obligation on that count.

We have a man, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, whom we owe six cables from 1983. We called him several times back then until the old man decided it was no longer worth his trouble. Yet if he comes in today I will give him the cables he's owed. I will even sell them to him at the price we charged back then, nine bucks a cable (they're $35 each now) just for the novelty of it. And out of an odd respect for the chutzpah it would take to try and claim them 43 years later.

Hey, it may even make good PR, right?

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.

Counting the Days

Am I stupid? Don't answer the question: it's rhetorical, no matter what witty repartee that invites. But to the point: Am I stupid or is that other guy?

That other guy - I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name - called me yesterday about dropping his machine off for repair. If you haven't already heard, it's been extremely busy at the old barn lately. 11 repairs came in on Friday alone, followed by 3 on Monday as well as some cables to fix. I'm back to where I can't walk around the Shop again. I decided I would take no new work for a few weeks until I could catch up.

Cloyce then calls about his unit. "I'm sorry, Cloyce, I'm too blocked up. I'm not taking any new work until May 1st."

"Okay, Marty, I understand," Cloyce answers.

Two hours later he arrives at the old barn, with his machine. "I know it'll be awhile, Marty, but I figured I'd drop it off to you."

Could I have explained it any better than I did? How could anyone interpret I'm not taking any new work until May 1st as I'd better drop my machine off to Marty today?  By my calendar yesterday was March 31st, a few days ahead of May 1st. Hell, a few weeks ahead of it. 

No, this is not an April Fools joke. It simply feels like one.

Organization Hurts

I have too much of a lazy streak, and I'm perfectly aware of it. Still, there are times where the cleaning bug hits. Or, more truthfully, forces my hand.

It's been incredibly busy at the old barn these last few weeks. For that I am truly thankful; it means the bills get paid and there's some left over to save and squander. I'm better at the latter than the former, although I am improving at putting money back, and even at avoiding impulse buys. At Meijer the other day I actually returned a baseball magazine to the shelf. Why read projections for the upcoming season which will almost certainly be wrong when I can read tons of baseball articles online, if not for free at least already paid for through internet and cell phone fees. 

But I digress.

As a consequence of the flush of work (heh, heh, flush, from a guy who sells drain snakes) the Shop has gotten very crowded. It reached the point where I was cautiously stepping over and around machines to get to my work spaces. I often had to move two to four units to get to the one I wanted to fix, then doing it again an hour later on the next repair. That won't do for the long haul. So I spent Saturday and Sunday organizing. 

I did a good job of it too, if I may say so myself. I created easy access to my tools and my main work areas. I could by the end of Sunday afternoon actually walk into what goes for my office and readily get to the shelves at the back of it, where I stock small parts and cutters. There were - try to wrap your head around this - aisles I could walk through from the front to the back of the old barn. It was still crowded. But getting from A to B was doable without risking accidental death or disfigurement.

Monday morning when I opened, around six AM to hit the work week running, the Shop was dark. I kill the lights at night, you see. As I reached into my pocket for my cell to use its flashlight function to illuminate my way to the fuse box (yes, the Shop still has fuses) I thought, "Marty, you don't need to do that. You created a path!" So I boldly went forth with no fear, not a care in the world...and knocked the wind out of me, striding smack into the handle of a drain machine which stuck out into the aisle. I sucker punched myself in the gut. Pride goeth before the fall indeed.

Learning From Me Pops

I just received my new business cards. I had the Shop address put on them. That should not surprise; the locals who actually come to see me need to know where its at while it doesn't really matter to the out of towners. And I learned from me Pops not to use me home address on such ephemera.

Me Pops was a smart man. But like so many of us he made his share of tactical errors, as he would himself confess. One was putting his home address, since it was also his business mailing address (mail never has come to the old barn, for whatever reason), on his first business cards. He found out quickly that that was a mistake.

Customers, and not the good and worthwhile ones, would hunt him down at horribly odd hours, 8:30 at night on a Saturday for example, to fix their cable or machine which had been broken for five days because they had an emergency job to handle. Dad, having a wife and bunch of rug rats to feed, clothe, and house, and also being concerned with someone else's emergency (who wants a backed up sewer at any time let alone late on a Saturday evening?) would generally open up and take care of business.

Yet that got old very fast. And, again, it was the less than stellar drain cleaners who demanded his time. Add this to the fact that a homeowner in dire straits would find another way out of their dilemma somehow, and he stopped such late night weekend nonsense. It would teach those special plumbers a valuable lesson too: get your drain snake fixed when it breaks, and not only when you would need it, potlikker.

Nah, Nobody'll Notice

Several years ago me brother Phil had the opportunity to repair a drain snake cable. I don't recall where me or me Pops were that day, but so it goes.

The man brings in a large cage type snake to have an end installed on a cable he had broken. It's important to know that the unit was cage style, because that means you could see approximately how much cable was in it. The particular machine Phil dealt with had a capacity of 100 feet of 3/4 inch cable. This too is important to understand.

There was around 20 feet of cable in the machine, me brother guessed. "I can put an end on that, but it's really not enough to work with on main sewer lines," Phil advised the guy.

"But you can do it?" he said. Being told it can certainly be done, he instructed Phil to do it. So Phil did, and the man paid him.

Me brother went outside to help him load the machine onto his pickup truck. Then the man let the truth come out. "I rented this from a place and lost over 80 feet of cable in a sewer, so that's why I wanted you to put an end on it. Do you think they'll notice?"

Phil had to stifle a laugh. "I imagine they will," he opined, in as kindly a manner as he possible

What do you think? I bet you'd notice it was missing. Things like that are pretty obvious.

The First, and Last, Place I Looked

Please tell me this has happened to you. Please tell me I'm not the only one.

I needed a distributor tube to finish a snake repair. Don't worry about what it is, just trust me it's essential and that I had to have it. When I began fixing the drain machine it came from I had set the thing aside for when I could reassemble said snake.

Saturday I was all ready to finish that repair. I could not find that tube anywhere. Ninety minutes of searching came up with zilch, zero, nada. Finally surrendering to the omnipotent forces of drain snake repair I decided to leave it to Monday. Well, after I tripped over some junk which should not have been there to trip over and skinned up my left knee pretty bad. But that story is for another day. You've done that too I'm sure.

I opened the old barn at 6:30 this morning to put out an APB on that distributor tube. May as well start early, I figured, because if I don't find it by 8 I'll just have to go to the parts house and get a replacement on my dime. Right is right, eh?

The first place I looked was the top drawer on my work bench. But it's not there. It cannot possibly be there. That's the first place I looked on Saturday.

It was there. 

How in the name of all that is good and holy could I have overlooked it? It wasn't hidden, wasn't buried under the flotsam and jetsam which hides so much in the Shop. It. Was. Right. There.

Please tell me I'm not the only one who's done that. Please.

I Am What I Am

Years ago I fixed a drain snake while a customer waited because he was stuck. "You're my hero!" he said as he paid for the job.

"I'm no hero, I'm just a guy who fixes drain snakes," I modestly replied.

Yesterday a guy came into the old barn desperate for eight cables and a particular drain cleaning tool. I had it all. "Man, you are amazing!" I was told.

'Nah, I'm not amazing. I'm only a guy who sells drain snakes." 

It is nice to be complimented, to be well thought about. But humility is a good thing too.

Besides, what I am is magnificent. Get your adjectives right.

Universally Nonuniversal

I'm pretty good at holding my temper. But damn, that can be a challenge some days.

I spoke to a customer yesterday, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who wanted to come by and have one of those 'universal' foot pedals installed on his machine. A foot pedal is a common way to activate your drain snake.

"There is no universal foot pedal, Cloyce," I informed him. "There is no one style of foot pedal which works on every drain snake out there. But you can bring your machine down and I'll see what I can do."

"Oh no, Cosgriff, I'm holding one of those universal foot pedals in my hand right now. I just need you to install it."

This is a prime example of where I have trouble holding my temper. Truth be told, I want to lose it in situations like that. Still, you know, maturity and crap. "You can bring it with you Cloyce, and there is some interchangeability among foot pedals. But until I see it I can't promise you I can install it, at least not right away," I replied.

"You'll figure out something Cosgriff." Well, I ought not have to figure something out if it's universal, Cloyce.

His pedal didn't work on his machine without my having to change the air diaphragm switch which it was supposed to engage with. But that's universal parts for ya, Cloyce.

The Apple Falls

They say they apple doesn't fall far from the tree. They say that because it's true.

Me Pops would routinely get, I thought, very hung up on time. He would always want the first appointment of the day with his doctor, typically 8 AM, and would be in the waiting room at 7:15. Dad was the prototypical dad: it doesn't hurt at all to get there a bit early. 

I generally felt he thought too much about how much time something would take. Back in the day, he might be sending me on a pickup that was four miles from the old barn and hasten me along with the admonition, "You better go, it's going to take most of the morning." Not really, I would think to myself. It could take maybe as long as 45 minutes if things worked modestly against me, but no big deal.

Yesterday morning I was sending me brother Phil out for two stops, one in Oak Park, one in Ferndale. They are near northern suburbs of Detroit, neighbors, in fact, as they share city limits on one side. At most they're six miles from the Shop. We're looking at no more than a 15 mile round trip. Even factoring in the inevitable down time at both stops it would take Phil an hour, hour and a half or so, tops, outside of a catastastroke, as me Grandpa Joe used to say, to get the job done.

Still, as Phil pottered around the old barn for a few minutes before leaving I found myself thinking, "You oughta get going, boy, it's going to take you most of the day." I didn't say it, but I thought it.

Either way, the apple has fallen.

Screw Loose

I ought to be far past the point where it would surprise me, but I'm not. You just think that maybe, just maybe, there might be hope for humanity, that things might change. Of course, they don't.

A customer at the Shop the other day came in to have me put a chuck on his machine. The bolts which attach a handle to the unit were loose. Way loose. So loose in fact that the handles were nearly falling off. "Could you tighten those for me, Cosgriff?" the customer asked.

I don't mind doing that per se. What astonished me is how he could have let them get so loose to begin with. That kind of thing doesn't happen overnight. You never noticed it before now? And you're a professional. You have tools. Why didn't you tighten them up eons ago? 

I've seen this with gear cases on certain drain snakes. The case cover is fastened to the machine with six bolts. All six would be loose by several threads, actually leaving a visible gap between the gear case and the gear case cover. Yet the customer would cry and pout to me about the cost of replacement gears because the old gears had ground down to nothing because the gear oil had all leaked out of the gear case because those bolts were clearly loose. It never occurred to you that bolts set in place to attach something to something should actually be made to attach to that something?

I'm not the best myself at certain chores but I know enough about screws and bolts to understand they should be properly tightened and to see when they are not. Yet after 50 years in the old barn folks still come in with absurdly loose connections and then ask, almost as an afterthought, "Oh, could you tighten those?"

Yes I can. But you really didn't think far enough ahead to tighten them before you came to see me? Some things are just beyond explanation.

Weekly Disorder

Today is, what, Thursday? Thursday, correct? So tomorrow is Friday. The day after Thursday is Friday, am I right? And Wednesday precedes Thursday, for that matter. I have my facts straight, then?

Then why, dear customer who did it, were you calling me on Wednesday to see if the repair I promised you for Friday was ready?

"I'm not rushing you Cosgriff. I'm just checking." Uh-huh.

Look, if I promise you Friday it will be ready on Friday, the good Lord willing and the creek don't rise. If however you call on Friday and I have indeed forgotten or somehow not delivered on my promise, we'll deal with that then and with my sincere apologies. But until then, please remember that Friday is after Thursday, which comes after Wednesday. Understand?

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.

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.

Bait Snake

As most of you likely know by now, I sell and repair drain snakes. They are the steel cable machines used to open various drains. 

We have a shop, colloquially called the Shop or the Old Barn, where we store new units and the ones left for repair. The Shop (or the Old Barn, if you prefer) is well secure. We have four locks on the door, an alarm on the building, and we even run heavy chains with locks through the machines we have on hand inside, all just to make things as theft proof as possible.

A few weeks ago I bought out the remains of an old plumbing store. There wasn't much, but there were some cables I could use or resell. And I bought an old drain cleaning machine which wasn't worth much. In fact, the company which made it is out of business. But I bought it anyway.

Back at the Shop me brother Phil asked incredulously, "What'd you buy that for? We can't get parts or anything. It's obsolete."

"True," I responded, "But you know how there was that old TV show called Bait Car, where the police rigged a car so that they could catch car thieves?"

"Yeah."

"This will be our bait snake. We'll leave it unlocked and if any thief gets this far into our building in a late night robbery attempt, maybe he'll just grab it and leave the rest alone, seeing them locked."

Yes, we have a Bait Snake. Think I can talk Tru TV into a new reality show?

A Lesson in Magnetism

One of my kids - I won't say which so that they might each take credit for it - bought me one of those magnetic bowls which you can use while doing various repairs. In my case, some repairs I do involve removing and replacing very small screws in order to access a part or complete a job. When you can place such tiny items in a magnetic bowl, you can't lose them. At least, it's harder to.

Yet you can lose them. That is not the fault of the bowl, but you can.

The other day as I finished installing a power cord on a unit, I had dutifully reset three of the four little screws which held on the steel plate which covered the box where the cord was attached. Are you with me so far?

For whatever reason, the magnetic bowl would not allow me to grab that last screw. Twice, my fingers just slipped off of it, the bowl refusing to release the little mongrel. On the third try, and admittedly in a fit of mild anger, I yanked at that last small bolt. The tray let go, but the screw flew from my hand as I hadn't really gripped it well. A second later I heard just the tiniest ting where the screw hit the Shop floor, likely fifty feet or more away. I swear it mocked me.

I knew I'd never find it. I had to scrounge around old junk drawers until I found a suitable replacement. And I will treat the magnetic bowl with great respect from now on.

Cloyce is Important

One of the fun things the whole COVID debacle has done is mess up the supply chain. But it's a cross to bear and we simply have to deal with it.

A customer of mine, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, is a bit self-important. He didn't want to hear supply chain issues about getting his drain snake back. He only just dropped it off Tuesday and I told him expect ten days or so, which is actually an improvement over the last year on such things. To my irritation, that did not stop him from dropping in Friday. "I already told you ten days, Cloyce," I explained.

"Well, why don't you get on the phone and tell them I need my machine?" he demanded.

"Let me do that. I'll call and say that I really need that part. They'll tell me supply issues. I'll say it's for Cloyce. They'll pause, and I'll hear their worry, panic, and concern. Then they'll say, why didn't you tell us it was for Cloyce to begin with? We'll fly someone out immediately to pick up that one part, then drone ship it right to your shop door. It will be worth all the expense to get Cloyce that twenty dollar part right away and keep him happy." At that I stopped and stared at Cloyce.

He stared back. "You ain't even going to try, are you, Cosgriff?"

No, Cloyce, I'm not. You'll get a call in about ten days. Deal with it.