The plumber

God’s gift on Earth, it seems, as I have had to wait for two weeks before the guy deemed me important enough to show up. We’ve been hauling buckets of water from under the sink for the past week now, as both sinks no longer drain. So he shows up this morning, just as the buckets under the sink overflow. At nine, not at 8:30, as was promised, but hey, ‘kniesoor, die daar op let’, as we say in Dutch.
He looks at it. “Well, I’m kind of busy, I’ll come back in the afternoon as soon as I have finished my other work.” ‘Come back after you’ve finished your other work’? Not likely, it is a Saturday. I won’t see that guy until Monday. Maybe.
So I insist. Politely. You don’t want to piss the guy off. Okay, he’ll try. And I do not want those white plastic harmonica pipes, I add. I want the regular, hard plastic drain pipes for under the sink. The idiot that installed those must not have been thinking straight. How can you install harmonica pipes under the sink? All the dirt is just waiting to get caught behind all these little obstructions. He’s looking at me, slightly puzzled? Straight pipes? Hard plastic? Yes, the regular white plastic pipes, S-shaped, for under the sink. “Oh, you want the old model. No, they don’t sell that anymore, only the new model, like you have now.” They don’t sell that anymore? My ass, I was at the hardware store yesterday, and they were right there. The idiot doesn’t want to have to measure things, nothing is easier than harmonica piping, but I’ve had the last idiotic plumber fooling me, saying that the regular plastic pipes don’t fit on the ‘old’ model sink of mine. This house was built in the 60’s, can’t be that old. So I add, very carefully again, that I am quite sure that somewhere someone will still sell him the old model. He’ll see. He’s got to go to the store first. He’s left the house, with the promise that he will return. I won’t keep my fingers crossed. That’ll be another two weeks before we see him again.