Jesse vs. Plumbor, Master of the Shower Underworld!

"Support local businesses", they always say! After all, small businesses are the real America or, um, something. It's a stance I can usually understand, unless you live in a small, particularly rural town, where small businesses are usually run by morons incapable of properly owning a gerbil, let alone an entire business. Absarokee, as a whole, is locally sort of infamous for this. I've lost count of how many times some local twit decided to start a restaurant, rented commercial property, made up some surprisingly professional signage, and maybe even backed it up with some decent sandwiches, only to quickly lose interest in the completely gross idea of actually having to be there and have the doors unlocked so customers can come in. Despite actually having a local customer base more than willing to give them money, a mere month or two after starting up their shiny new business, they'd give up and shut their doors, forever, due to laziness. Meanwhile - and this is something that seems to happen more in Columbus - plenty of thoroughly awful local businesses manage to keep going, despite having no discernible positive traits, I suppose because it's far easier in the long-term to commit oneself to less-than-half-assed work. In no case in recent memory has this been more obvious to me than in an extended kerfuffle involving the only plumber in town apparently.

Flash back to a couple weeks after I returned to Montana from the urban archaeological ruins that comprise the Detroit Metropolitan Statistical Area. Namely, the day when the water heater sprung a rather nasty leak. It's the second time I've faced an unending stream of water in this house and been completely ill-equipped to deal with it (one of the pipes under the sink burst a couple years ago), so now flooding comprises an occasionally recurring nightmare for me. Fun! Now, as directly stipulated by our landlady, we're only allowed to have work done in the house by local folk. Sigh. There's only one plumber in town, though he's not so good at his job. After going about a week without running water (the only way he knew to stop the constant gushing horror was to shut off our water entirely), he finally put in a shiny new water heater for us. Problem solved, right? You should know that I wouldn't be ranting about this if it was.

I'm not a plumber myself, nor do I know much about the art of plumbing in general, despite having played most of the Mario series. (Partly because we just don't see him plumb very much. He's a plumber, in the same way that Gus from Psych is a pharmaceutical representative.) So, I don't really understand HOW this happened. But, somehow, in the process of installing the new water heater, he managed to completely ruin the water pressure in most of the house. (To be fair, you can also blame this on the water quality in Columbus, which is seemingly taken directly from the Yellowstone River, without always even being filtered enough to remove all the gritty sediment.) Taking a shower was pretty damned hard, on account of the water just being a pathetic little trickle and all. He tried to remedy the problem by blowing compressed air up the faucets (?), and when that didn't work, he assured us that he would return at a later date to replace some pipes, which actually WOULD solve the problem! Awesome, right?

Cut to about a month later. We haven't heard from the guy, at all. This is obviously ridiculous, so we finally give him a call to see what's going on. "What the hell are you talking about? I never had any intention of fixing your pipes!" So, basically, the dude's refusing to do paid work that falls completely within the realm of his job title. Deeeelightful. And our landlady was just too disinterested to care. We had to actually go through the trouble of calling in the OWNER OF THE REAL ESTATE COMPANY to intimidate the guy into doing his job, and when THAT'S the easiest way to get this done, that's really bad. Yet, it's not surprising. Small businesses in really rural towns really aren't small businesses at all, when you account for the scale of everything. Even though their customer base looks pretty slim, one has to realise that they essentially DO typically manage to hold pathetic little monopolies on whatever service they offer. The townspeople regard supporting them as an act of goodwill towards fellow members of their tightly knit little community, perhaps not realising (or just refusing to accept) that they're really just being made to pay extra for less-than-stellar services because the only real alternative would be to drive an hour or more to an actual city. (And, again, if we COULD bring in a plumber from Billings, we could. Landlords are silly. There's definitely something to be said for owning your own home, I'm increasingly realising.)

So, he finally managed to find his way over here to fix our pipes. We now have proper water pressure. Unfortunately, he also had to completely bust up our bathtub to actually have at them. This brings us to where I am now - still waiting on that tub replacement. It's been roughly four months now since a significant part of the main bathroom has been usable. I know this stuff doesn't happen overnight, but....FOUR MONTHS. It's not like this is a major renovation project or anything! The first step in his process of giving us a new bathtub was bringing in a carpenter to build a platform to stick it on, and when he says "carpenter", he apparently means "random alcoholic I met at the bar who isn't actually a carpenter at all". Really, dude? You couldn't even find a sober not-carpenter? Took him over ten hours to do the job, which I see comprised nothing more than nailing three or four sheets of plywood together. Maybe he would've gotten it done faster if he wasn't quitting every fifteen minutes or so to go creepily drive around the block once, though I guess I shouldn't expect anything but creepiness from a guy in his mid-forties with a bleach-blond bowl cut. (If I ever make a film based on this ordeal, Jack McBrayer is the first and only choice to play this guy.) But anyway, that step's done, but of course we're still lacking the tub itself. Mr. Lousyplumberpants ordered it some time ago, and he has it in his possession now, but he's being predictably stubborn about putting it in. That is to say, we were told it would be done either Saturday or Monday. But, when we called to see if he could narrow it down (Friday evening, a point by which I think it's perfectly reasonable to want to know), he reacted with a disproportionate level of yelling, screaming, shouting rage. "WHY DO YOU INSIST ON HAVING TO BE THERE WHILE I PUT IT IN???" Oh, yeah, I almost forgot to mention that he's been pressuring us to hand over the keys to the house so he can do this whenever he damn well pleases, while we're gone, presumably so he can steal something or masturbate somewhere particularly unsavoury. Not gonna happen, of course. We were also informed that, AS PUNISHMENT FOR ASKING THIS SIMPLE QUESTION OF CLARIFICATION, he decided he didn't feel like doing it Saturday OR Monday. How charmingly professional. He also hasn't allowed us to reschedule, either, and I'm increasingly getting the feeling that it'll take ANOTHER instance of pressure of losing his entire contract with the real estate company to get the final step of this job done. And even then, I clearly can't be sure that he won't destroy SOMETHING ELSE in the process of fixing up our shower. Maybe the toilet? I dunno. At least we have a second functioning toilet to fall back on if that happens.

The moral of the story, of course, is that people who live in larger towns and cities have every right to be elitist pricks, because rural America really IS filled with lousiness. :)