The toilet made the sound of a resounding bang after flushing. One of those bangs that you immediately know for sure that it won’t go away by itself, even if you initially do your utmost not to hear it anymore. So time for the plumber. Anyone who senses any reluctance in this sentence senses the situation well. We cannot do without this professional group, yet annoying associations keep popping up: waiting times, call-out costs, unverifiable invoices, incomprehensible jargon.
We used a regular plumber with whom we had little experience when it came to emergency jobs. This seemed like such a job. We could no longer test unsuspecting visitors in particular with a kind of thunderclap from the cistern when leaving the toilet. Some feared for their lives.
A young plumber reported, his older colleague waited outside in the company car. Apparently they were counting on a quick routine job. That did not go well. Soon he worriedly called for some towels as a dam against flooding water. After about twenty minutes of frantic knocking and tinkering, he stood up and assured me that the job had been done satisfactorily. Checkout was significantly faster. No sooner had he set himself up than he presented the bill on his mobile: 215 euros. Like emptying a cistern.
When I inspected the toilet area immediately after he left, I noticed a rapidly rising puddle of water around the pot. I called the company, the mechanics returned, the young mechanic now accompanied by an older colleague, who said after one look into the gaping mouth of the cistern: “How can you get that rubber…” I crept away, it was getting too embarrassing. In fifteen minutes they were done with their work. The older mechanic also pointed out that the new cover of the cistern showed damage. “We should not have delivered it like this, you will receive a new one.”
Everyone relieved, the departing mechanics, us. Until a relative, who happened to be visiting, said: “I can still hear the toilet running.” Embarrassed, we stood around the pot. The water ran as if death were on its heels: fast, without any interruption.
Again I called the company. Pretty angry now. The operator also turned out to be the owner of the company. His voice sounded skeptical when I asked—it was Friday afternoon—if his people could come back before the weekend. He thought I was exaggerating, it didn’t seem urgent to him, at least not urgent enough to call his people back at the end of Friday afternoon. As long as I kept turning the tap on the side on and off, I would be fine, he assured me. I said I had no idea about faucets, that’s what plumbers were for. If I had asked very nicely, he would have considered it, he added, but he would not let himself be forced. We argued like this for a while before saying goodbye without saying goodbye.
The following Monday – we had struggled to get by with ‘the tap to the side’ – I called back. Did they still come? To my surprise, he was sweet as hell. He had heard from his people that things had indeed gone wrong. They came to help us the same day.
The moral: dare to be unkind to your unfriendly plumber.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on August 30, 2023.