What are the chances?…

Yesterday I went to do a job for a bloke in Yokine – way out of my normal area, but I have a regular gig in Osborne park so I fitted him in.

I could tell when I arrived he was a tad skeptical of us retic blokes and told me soon after I arrived that his retic was working until his last service, but now had lost pressure. Implication – it was all working well till you guys did your thing…

So I checked the pressure… and it was lame, but I sent someone else last time so I had nothing to compare it to. That was his garden beds.

Then his lawn didn’t work at all. This also worked previously… I discovered a faulty solenoid restricting flow – which also was ‘ok before you came’. I explained that these things happen and it wasn’t actually a ’cause effect relationship’. He wasn’t convinced I could tell.

He had done some DIY on his garden beds and fitted the wrong nozzles so I changed them over and the water flow improved. Then after running the system for 5 minutes I began to see a leak way down deep. I dug it up and the pipe was almost cut in two. ‘Oh yeah… I would have done that with a spade,’ he said a little more coyly.

“hmmm… that might be the cause of the problem then’ I said and thought to myself ‘not the work we did previously’.

After an hour or so he started to ease up and was friendly and chatty. I could tell he had begun to trust me and didn’t see me as someone out to screw him.

So I finished the job, installed a new solenoid, flushed the line and then put the nozzle back on to give one last test. But when I turned it on there was no water…

Odd… very odd… given it was there 20 seconds previous.

I did all the checks and all of my work looked ok. It made no sense.

‘Check your house for water’ I said.

He did and discovered there was no water in there either. Its funny how you can tell that someone is looking at you and thinking ‘my house worked before you came!’

The neighbours were out so we checked their water and discovered they had been cut off too. It began to dawn on him that maybe it wasn’t me…

It turned that in the 20 seconds between flushing the system and then rechecking it the Water Authority had cut off the water because a pipe around the corner had burst. What are the chances?…

Fortunately he understood, reverted to ‘friendly customer’ and paid the bill.

Of course when the water came back on I had left the solenoid in the manual ‘on’ position after testing, so I got a call late last night telling me that the water wouldn’t go off… An easy fix and thankfully one we were able to do over the phone.

How to give a bloke a bit of stress…