Feeling Bad For Cloyce

I'm in sales, and I like sales. I particularly like to make big sales. Well, most of time, anyways. Sometimes a good sale does make me feel bad though, believe it or not.

There's this drain cleaner who comes into the old barn, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, who's a genuine, purely nice guy. Indeed you can't help but like him, he's so nice. But he's had a run of awful luck lately.

A couple of weeks ago Cloyce lost nine cables in a bad sewer; the homeowner didn't have the money to dig the line up for repair. The cables Cloyce uses are $65 each. We can all say ouch at that, can't we?

A few weeks back in a flood, his power unit was covered in water for several hours. There's another two grand to replace that.

Last Friday morning Cloyce needed another eight cables, again, remember, at sixty five bucks a pop, after someone did not tell him a line they knew was broken was broken.

Suffice it say that I've made a few dollars off Cloyce recently. Yet I honestly feel bad about it. All right, yes, I took his money. Still, I do hope his, ah, fortune improves soon.

Patron Saint of What?

The phone rang yesterday morning; it was a customer in distress. "Oh, man, Marty, I'm glad you're there! I need help, and you're the Patron Saint of Drain Cleaners!"

Well, how about that? I'm a saint while I'm still here on Earth. But what would my stained glass window look like?

It would be in a large cathedral, of course, with me operating a genuine Electric Eel Model C, hands firmly on the handle, cable held straight, my eyes turned piously towards Heaven as the water begins to drain down the pipe. An aura, a subdued halo would be around my head as I gaze, perhaps. I might be wearing the brown robe of a monk. Bright, shining yellow glass from above my head would appear to  bless my task. Just imagine the actual Sun coming through all that. Saint Marty of Detroit, Patron of Drain Cleaners, would be on a small plaque at the bottom of the window. An Angelic Choir can be heard in the background.

I like it.

Drain man

Yes, Cloyce was a poor excuse for a drain cleaning expert. I do believe that I ought to offer you one example of exactly how bad he was.

Often drains will have an access known as a riser outside of a house. This allows a plumber to cable a line without going into the building. It also avoids a trap, a sharp turn which can be difficult for a snake cable to navigate.

Cloyce arrived at a job and located the riser. He then began to snake the drain. He pulled out a small rug. He pulled out a wig. A garden hose came out of the line next, to be followed by a bed sheet. Several items of clothing found their way to the end of his cable. Soon he had a pile of various items and debris about three feet high laying in the customer's back yard. I know this from what another plumber who had by then arrived on the scene told me.

Cloyce had manged to go backwards through the riser (an impressive feat in an odd sort of way, truth be told) many times. His cable had burst through the cap on the line inside the basement of the house. Each time he ran the cable through he pulled out whatever in the basement engaged the cable. Yet he never once imagined that something might be wrong. He simply kept going back at it, figuring that eventually he would get everything out of the drain and that it would run just fine.

The inside of the basement, checked by Cloyce and the second man after that guy's arrival, found a basement nearly devoid of anything but with bits of paper stuck all over the walls. They had been ground up and thrown onto the walls as though avant-garde decor.

Yep, Cloyce was not a good drain cleaner.

One mile past, or, missed it by that much

You know, people are stupid. Really, profoundly stupid. I'm learning that more and more with each passing day.

To be sure, there has been ample evidence of it the last thirty years of my life. What does, yet should not astound me, is how I can still be amazed when it happens.

The latest examples come from my sales job. In directing a potential new customer to my store, I cautioned him not to go beyond Warren Avenue here in Detroit; he would have gone too far if he had. An hour later I get a call from the guy's cell. He was more than a mile beyond our place of business. "I saw Warren and never saw you so I kept on going," he explained to me. You saw the street which I told you was too far and KEPT GOING? It never occurred to you to circle around?

My other phone started ringing, so I hung up on him. I employed Red Foreman's favorite phrase as I did.

Another fella called to asked if he could have his snake (slang for the drain cleaning equipment we sell) repaired by us. "Probably, but tell me what you have so that I can tell you if I have access to the parts you might need," I asked.

"A snake," he responds.

"Okay," I said, trying to be patient, "But what type of machine exactly?"

"Uhh, the kind that opens sewers."

I asked, with no little exasperation, "I need a make and model number."

"Uhhhhhh, y'all worked on it 'bout five years ago..." he began.

Click.

Dang. I hung up on my only customer from 2012. That was such a good year too.

I tell you, the Harvard Business School is dead wrong. The customer isn't always right.