I'm always stressing to my students and students in
the program how important the simple skill of listening is. We talk about
a lot of business, utilize (and praise) the support of ASMP and try to cast our
students out with a solid understanding of the business tools needed to find
and retain a client.
I recently had an experience that taught the lesson
better then anything that could be or has ever been said in a classroom.
To understand fully you need to know that my wife and I have a rather
small house in the western suburbs of Chicago, if you have been out you know
what I mean. Alongside Kate and I, are our two boys, 10 and 12 so the real
estate of the single bathroom is at a premium. My poor wife, surrounded by
her three boys (even the 2 cats and hamster are boys) the shower is often her
only escape.
For about a year now the pressure has been on a
steady decline until recently when it barely had the pressure for the faucet to
convert itself from tub filler, to a shower. So like anybody who doesn't
want to attempt a re-pipe or other fix I started calling around to get an idea
of what a fix would involve. And don't get me wrong, I do a lot around
the house but the thought of water spewing in from all angles is enough of a
visual for me to call a professional.
Call number one: a ten-minute inspection and a
three thousand dollar estimate (of course they won't know for sure until they
'get inside.' Get inside what? The pipes??? Are you really going to
get inside, I thought you already said they all need to go???
Call number two yielded a similar 10-minute once
over, although this one did at least turn the water on to check the pressure.
This was $950.00 for a partial re-pipe after taping on the pipe
like a damn Pipe Whisperer to determine that the original 90+ year old
pipes are full of 'gunk.' I gotta say, I'm no plumber but the pipe
whisperer bit (and the look on his face while he waited for the pipe to air it's secrets)
was both too odd and too much for me.
While at a little league game, (our city and our
oldest) are big into baseball, another parent told me her cousin-in-law is a
plumber who lives a block or two over. A couple messages back and forth
and I was answering a very thorough battery of questions, the conversation
ended with me texting him a couple detailed images of fittings, faucets and
other plumbing 'stuff'. He explained I may need new inserts on the faucet, with
the pictures he would be able to bring the right one.
I really like where this is heading already...
