You pay for the years

Tradesmen everywhere have a problem. Now I'm not saying it's only tradesmen. Plumbers, chippys, sparkies. I'm sure website designers, cleaners, car detailers, and more will often come across a similar problem.

"You charge too much"

"You were only here half an hour, why is it so expensive?"

My brother, who is a landscape gardener, has even had a client ask, "If I buy the materials would it be cheaper?" The cheek!

I'm an electrician (very nearly qualified.)

I am not a plumber, and I had a plumbing problem.

The washing machine, sink, and bath waste water all wash away through the same waste pipe in our bathroom and said waste pipe was blocked. Being the kind of person that hates to spend money on something that I think I can fix myself, I decided I'm going to sort it. So I did just that. I spent days thinking I'd sorted it to find it backed up again, the washing machine emptying and the bath filling with the waste water, pulling up floor boards, springy coil things rammed down the pipes, a bit of cable I had lying around rammed down there, filling all three pipes with gallons of pipe cleaner. Nothing. No win. All hope lost. I'd had enough.

So, I messaged my plumber mate. In fact, he's my sister in law's brother, but that's a bit of a mouth full.

"I'll be there in 30-45 minutes."

Bear in mind this was 8 o'clock Sunday morning on a bank holiday weekend.

Absolute hero.

The wife loses her shit and starts hoovering like a woman possessed. She then makes herself scarce with the dog. She gets a bit too excited when guests come over. The dog, of course. I mean the dog.

Anyway, the sister-in-law's-brother-plumber turns up, on time, with some big green plunger looking thing. About three minutes later, I kid you not, he had finished. Plug one hole up, plunge the other hole, swap. Done.

I couldn't believe it. All of that time I had wasted stressing, piles of laundry amassing at the foot of the bed, the bath filling with manky green, and brown gunk. One hundred and eighty seconds. Done. Better than it was before.

I thanked him profusely and threw some money at him. He refused, of course, being family. I insisted and he begrudgingly and very gratefully accepted. Honestly, if you drag your arse out the house on a bank holiday Sunday morning and rescue me from myself you're getting paid, god damn it!

The point is that he knew what he was doing. I didn't.

Plumbers, electricians, carpenters. They go through an apprenticeship lasting around four years. You get treated much like crap for those four years. You get all the crappy jobs, carrying tools, unloading deliveries. Bottom of the pile. Lowest of the low. He probably had days like me, trying to work out what the hell to do. Failing, getting your ear chewed off by your supervisor, succeeding, and failing again. Doing the same things over and over until it becomes second nature.

Then once you qualify you spend years building on that training, gaining experience where you can, building on that knowledge base. It takes a long, long time to be able to do this work and earn a good living out of it.

That’s what you are paying for. Not the three minutes they spend sorting the problem. You pay for the years.

Next time I have a plumbing problem, I know who I'm gonna call.