The plumber was in the hallway of our apartment when I entered. At his feet lay all kinds of hoses and pipes that had never been seen here before. “You missed something,” he said.
He took me into the kitchen where my wife was still enjoying his repairs. “The hose under the sink was clogged,” she said. “There was all this black, smelly grease in it.”
“That’s quite normal,” said the plumber. “All kinds of things accumulate if you don’t do anything about it.”
It didn’t seem like a reproach, but it certainly wasn’t a compliment. “I’ll show you how to prevent this,” he said.
The teacher in him had awakened, the two caught students listening meekly. He took a wooden handle with a suction cup, also called a plopper, planted it (the plopper is male) in the sink and turned on the tap full.
“You should do this once every two weeks,” he said. “You let the water come to the brim, and when the tank is full, take the popper out so the water can run down the drain. Mind you, you shouldn’t pop with the popper, just take it out.”
Were there any further questions? New? “Then I point out that it is wise to have us come once every four or five years to check the matter completely.”
We promised to get well.
He went into the hallway to bring down his heavy stuff.
“Shall I help?” I asked.
He smiled affably. “If you were twenty years younger, I’d say, ‘Yes!’”
I understood that this was going to be a day of defeat and smiled back as blandly as possible.
“He talks a lot,” my wife said wearily as he descended the stairs, “but he is a professional. It now seems to have finally been resolved.”
A moment later he was back to pay. “I like to give people as much information as possible,” he said. “They are entitled to that. Then they don’t have to let us come so often. There are plumbers who don’t say anything because it’s better for the business.”
I asked him about the size of the company he worked for.
“We used to employ twice as many people,” he said. “But we have become more critical of the staff, there were some who were not good. Once, together with a colleague, after a hard job, I sat at the table with the customer. It was still in the time of the written receipts. There was a gold Parker on the table. Afterwards, the colleague took it out of his pocket outside. I pulled white. “How can you do that?” I asked. He raised his shoulders. We talked about it for two days and finally decided to return the pen. ‘Yes’, the customer said to my colleague, ‘I would have missed it immediately, but if you want to keep it… I have enough pens.’ And he gave it back!”
He looked at us faithfully. “The temptation can be great. When I work in a bathroom and there are a lot of gems, I always say, ‘Ma’am, will you take those away?’”
When he finally left, I said to my wife, “We’ll never get a plumber like that again.” And I hurried to the kitchen.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“Plop with the plopper,” I said.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of November 12, 2021
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