It’s A Good Thing The Plumbers Aren’t Revolting
I worked for a plumbing contractor who had a retail store for seven years. There are many stories from those days. This is one of them.
I was helping a guy at the counter with some minor repairs, and he commented that he wished he could find a plumber who could get rid of the sewage smell in one of his bathrooms. Upon inquiry, he told me that in the mornings, it was so bad they literally couldn’t use that bathroom.
From experience, I knew that this was caused by some sort of leak in the sewage piping, usually the trap under the sink, letting noxious gases escape. I explained that to him, and he said they’d had a number of plumbers come out, change the trap, tinker with this or that, all with no success. He was ready to give up.
I told him that we’d fix it, but if it wasn’t in the accessible pipes under the sink, it was likely to be expensive. He said he didn’t care, he just wanted to be able to use the bathroom. So we sent out one of our plumbers, and told him to ‘fix’ it.
Turned out, it was a broken sewer main under the floor, and it took a full day and more to get it squared away. By the time the plumber was done, they’d removed the entire (concrete) floor to the bathroom and half the bedroom, to find the break. And there was so much raw sewage that had leaked out, they had to shovel it into five-gallon buckets, and had a three-foot-high mound in the backyard.
But the bathroom didn’t smell of sewage anymore (once the backyard was cleaned up). The bill was $2,500 (thirty years ago), and the homeowner gave the plumber a $500 tip in cash.
Plumbers often make more than doctors or even lawyers. And they’re underpaid.