Pipe Pressure: A Contractor's Story in Learning Business Lessons

There's some kind of saying in Scripture about "a little child shall lead them" - my pastor was talking about it last Sunday. It made me think about a time that I learned a lot from watching a little kid while I was on the job.

It started with a simple elementary school job shadow day: my sister brought her 10-year-old son Bobby to watch me and my crew fool around with the old copper in a foreclosed rowhouse downtown. The place was a mess, it was hard to get to, and the street parking situation was terrible, all of which tended to put most of us in a bad mood right off.

I was looking at the water lines while my sidekick stomped upstairs. Bobby was dutifully following my actions, watching me putter around with the toolbox and arrange the radio for optimal classic rock blast... at least for a while. But by the time I got down to assessing the joining of some of the homes water systems, Bobby had moved on to clinking metal object against the protruding sewer line behind me.

I told him to knock it off and return to some basic note taking, only to turn around a few minutes later (I could've sworn it was seconds) on hearing a rough, jagged sound. It turned out to be the sound of ripping gypsum, as Bobby pulled on an exposed piece of conduit, tearing a large whole in the drywall. After I sent the kid down and had a stern talk with them, I returned to the job, thinking everything was okay. I discovered I could not leave the child unattended for any length of time. The difficulty came when he treated the innards of the old home as a playground!

After the third offense, when I banished him to the third story bedroom with his hand-held Nintendo games, I started thinking about the correlation between the messed up basement wall and some of the things I'd been seeing when looking at Hank's work, particularly on a Monday. Cockeyed faucets, slanting PVC, and thin copper lines that bore the marks of a good sound thrashing were common at our job sites.

What it all meant to me was that Bobby's errant behaviour symbolized the way some plumbers handle delicate systems roughly, sometimes dismantling more than they fix. It isn't physics, but it is a science in its own right; the right touch can mean a perfect installation and a shaky hand can ruin the job.

We did reach a consensus, but not without some words over conflicting methodologies. I eventually won out, and the work quality on the job did seem to improve. We basically started paying more attention to the pressure that we put on the system as we approached repairs. And all of this improvement would not have been possible without the help of a little tyke who couldn't keep from disturbing the inner workings of an old house. We could all learn a lot from situations like that one: keep an eye on your crew, because really, they're just boys grown up. Without some ground rules, your job site can easily start to look like a playground.