Kordts
In the Trades
As most of you or may not know, Illinois has been in a deep freeze for about two weeks. I have been getting quite a few, not crazy amounts of freeze-up calls. One call, was for a toilet backing up into a tub. I get there today, after being off the last two days because of a bug my kid brought home from school. It's an old garage type building, with an apt. scabbed on upstairs. The water and waste hang on an outside wall. Most of the exposed parts were insulated. Some of the plumbing was boxed over and workbenches built there. A blind lady lives upstairs and it's squalor city. The aide said that they let water trickle to keep the pipes from freezing. Well, the trickle was fine, until the heat quit in the garage part and the cast iron froze solid. I was dealing with the owner's daughter, I told her the backup was caused by the heat failing, and I couldn't thaw the pipes without ripping all the stuff away from them. This would take a couple of hours, and then I had no idea how long it would take a salamander to heat things up. I was there for 1-1/2 hour and my helper was there for 2 hours. She said her brother would strip all the stuff away and thaw out the pipes. I said, okay, $250.00. I was being nice because I figured they had a long night ahead of them. She calls back and says that's too much, because I didn't fix the problem. The pipes are probably 60 foot long, and she wants it diagnosed and thawed for 250? I told her fine, you can stiff me now, but I'll never take another call from you as long as I live. She said, no, appreciate that your here in town there hasn't been a plumber for years, I'll pay you, but what I think it's worth. It would have been cheaper to pay me the money because I got a feeling that social services is going to hear about a blind woman with substandard plumbing causing raw sewge to back up and stand in the tub.