You know the saying: boys will be boys. That's why taking a 10-year-old out on a plumbing job is not such a good idea in general. However, you might learn a little bit about how not to tackle a particular problem, or why your crew always seems to be in the middle of a genuine mess.
It started with a simple elementary school job shadow day: my sister brought her 10-year-old son Bobby to watch me and my crew fool around with the old copper in a foreclosed rowhouse downtown. The site was a wreck, practically inaccessible with terrible parking, and we all were put in a bad mood at the start.
I was looking at the water lines while my sidekick stomped upstairs. Bobby was dutifully following my actions, watching me putter around with the toolbox and arrange the radio for optimal classic rock blast... at least for a while. But by the time I got down to assessing the joining of some of the homes water systems, Bobby had moved on to clinking metal object against the protruding sewer line behind me.
I told him to knock it off and return to some basic note taking, only to turn around a few minutes later (I could've sworn it was seconds) on hearing a rough, jagged sound. It turned out to be the sound of ripping gypsum, as Bobby pulled on an exposed piece of conduit, tearing a large whole in the drywall. After I sent the kid down and had a stern talk with them, I returned to the job, thinking everything was okay. I discovered I could not leave the child unattended for any length of time. The difficulty came when he treated the innards of the old home as a playground!
After the third offense, when I banished him to the third story bedroom with his hand-held Nintendo games, I started thinking about the correlation between the messed up basement wall and some of the things I'd been seeing when looking at Hank's work, particularly on a Monday. Cockeyed faucets, slanting PVC, and thin copper lines that bore the marks of a good sound thrashing were common at our job sites.
What it all meant to me was that Bobby's errant behaviour symbolized the way some plumbers handle delicate systems roughly, sometimes dismantling more than they fix. It isn't physics, but it is a science in its own right; the right touch can mean a perfect installation and a shaky hand can ruin the job.
We did reach a consensus, but not without some words over conflicting methodologies. I eventually won out, and the work quality on the job did seem to improve. We basically started paying more attention to the pressure that we put on the system as we approached repairs. And all of this improvement would not have been possible without the help of a little tyke who couldn't keep from disturbing the inner workings of an old house. Everyone can take a lesson from this: keep an eye on your crew, because really, they're just boys grown up. Without some ground rules, your job site can easily start to look like a playground.
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Scott Rodgers is a
plumber who has recently begun writing articles for both a plumbing and non-plumbing audience. To view more of plumbing articles, visit http://eLocalPlumbers.com
