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14 March Well, I'm Not In Prison.....Here's a crazy little nugget I read on MSN today:
"The truth is that 90 percent of American men have been married by the age of 40, which, if you subtract prison inmates, is almost the entire straight male population."
I'm 41.....not married and not in prison.....so what exactly are they inferring here? The article didn't cite a source so I'm not sure who is representing the truth in this case. Should I be concerned? 13 March South West Plumbing, SeattleOkay I writing about my plumbing experiences with South West Plumbing in Seattle so that if anyone else searches for them online, maybe I can help them out. To be fair, I'm sure nobody is ever happy with what they have to pay for a plumber, myself included but I realize they'e in business to make money and they have a right to charge what the market will bear. However, I think $600-800 an hour is a bit excessive for snaking out a sewer line. I've had an occasional problem with my sewer line backing up into my bathroom, it happens once in a blue moon and then everything slowly seeps back down. Well it happened twice over the weekend and Monday morning I decided I was going to have a professional come in and snake out the entire line and diagnose what was going on.
I searched the internet and couldn't sort out who was close so I turned to old fashioned yellow pages and came up on South West which looked like a nice local shop. Called them up and they said someone could be there in less than an hour, between 10am-noon and they would give me an estimate. Here's where they get great feedback, they showed up right at 10am (surprise) and the guys seemed nice enough. I explained the problem to them and they said they charged a flat rate and they'd have to go calculate that in the truck. They came back and quoted me $766.43 and my jaw dropped...I told them that seemed way too expensive to me and they said well maybe they could knock some off if I removed the toilet and re-seated it myself. They recalculated and said they could knock off $188.92 if I did that myself. I said I still thought it was high but they kind of gave me the hard sell and I was already late for work so I foolishly caved. BTW-it took me three minutes to remove the toilet and four minutes to reinstall, and they were going to charge me $188 to do that. Should have been a huge red flag right there! They also gave me a wax ring which I told them I already had and also a flange repair kit that turned out to be the wrong size. I could have bought the items at the local hardware store for about $5 so no great deal there.
So they put down a couple of mats, which again I had put my own down already and spent a couple minutes to crawl under my house just to look at my pipes and then assembled a motorized snake. They spent about 20 minutes of snaking 100 ft. of line and hit one small blockage they said. They were out the door and in their truck 45 minutes later. Total time spent door to door, 45 minutes...total bill with $50 tax, $628!! This includes the time they spent trying to sell me on hiring them to run a camera down the line (they didn't have one with them but would come back to do that for $375) and digging up my old concrete line and replacing it with a plastic one. That's buried under my concrete driveway so I didn't ask how much that would cost. At $600 an hour, I'd likely need to take out another mortgage to pay for it.
So they were prompt, polite and my line hasn't backed up again for the last few days BUT.....I feel the price was way too much and they don't guarentee their work and no warrenty without the aforementioned camera work down the line. They also didn't really read the dispatchers notes because they said they expected a problem in a basement. They blamed the mix-up on the dispatcher but the office read the dispatcher's notes back to me and it was exactly what I told her, they were making that part up.
I called the office and said I appreciated the prompt and courteous service but that I felt they charged way too much for the work actually performed. I was transferred to a manager who told me he'd look at the bill and take it into consideration but that they charged higher rates because they gave superior service. He told me that they had a formula for determining how much each job should take and that they would not have charged more if the job had taken 4-5 hours instead of 45 minutes. I kind of doubt that but the actual labor with equipment use portion of the call was only 20 minutes and total time was 45 minutes!
He called the next day and said he was still waiting for the tech to turn the invoice in...Finally, today he called back and said he looked at the invoice and said he thought charges were totally fair. He said they charged more because they had "nice, clean trucks and their tech wore clean uniforms instead of overalls. They were a larger company with a high overhead." I told him at those kind of prices I would not be using them again and he said that was fine because there were "plenty of people who were willing to pay more for their superior customer service." You know I just wanted my sewer line unclogged, I didn't care if the tech's outfit was spotless. He's a plumber, I expect him to get dirty on the job. Speaking of job, I feel I was jobbed....
Today I did a quick google search of their name and found a bunch of testamonials from people warning of their excessive prices....wished I had done that to begin with. Saved me a bunch of cash and a bitter taste left in my mouth.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing their work but I had a fairly simple problem that took basically no time for them to fix. (at least I hope it's fixed for now) I would have hoped that they would have seen fit to refund part of my money due to the ease of the job. They are just way overpriced and seem to think they're plumbers to the stars or something. As for the claims that plenty of people are willing to pay their rates, I'm sure many of those people are fools like me who cave when they show up and then tell us the amount. Check out the other testamonials on line and you'll see a pattern....
11 March Time Waits For No Man....However, I waited to change my clocks when we did the "fall back" thing.....actually I never changed most of them, including the one in my truck and as of 2am last Sunday, they're all back to the correct time with daylight savings. So by procrastinating, I saved time and energy....Am I smart or what? 10 March Another Moral Crusader Bites The Dust....Okay I thought I was having a bad day. My plumbing problem reared it's ugly head again this morning, the drain backing up while I was in the shower. So I bit the bullet and called a plumbing company (more on that later) to try and figure this damn thing out once and for all. They actually got there fast, were friendly guys and did a nice job, but......they didn't do that much and charged quite a bit. Over $600 for 45 minutes total time and about 15-20 of that was actually running a snake down the sewer pipe....I think I got jobbed and I'm kind of upset about it but I don't feel near as bad as Eliot Spitzer must feel right now.
Spitzer, Governor of New York, today was exposed (no pun intended) as having been caught up in a prostitution ring investigation. OOPS! MSN Headline - "Spitzer’s political career teetered on the brink of collapse Monday after the corruption-fighting politician once known as “Mr. Clean” was accused of paying for sex with a high-priced call girl." The 48-year-old father of three daughters, (and wife Silda who stood behind him at his "geeze I'm so sorry press conference") paid $4300 for about two and a half hours with a call girl sent out to meet Emperors Club VIP "Client 9" in a Washington D.C. Hotel.
"Prior to becoming governor, Spitzer spent eight years as Attorney General in New York. "His cases as attorney general included criminal prosecutions of prostitution rings and tourism involving prostitutes. In 2004, he was part of an investigation of an escort service in New York City that resulted in the arrests of 18 people on charges of promoting prostitution and related charges." and another one gone and another one gone, another one bites the dust....
Democratic Assemblyman John McEneny said: “I don’t think anyone remembers anything like this. The fact that the governor has a reputation as a reformer and there is a certain assumption as attorney general that you’re Caesar’s wife. It’s a different element than if you were an accountant.” Bigtime OOPS! (BTW I've never heard the term Caesar's wife used before, that's a good one.)
I also learned about the Mann Act of 1910, otherwise known as the White-Slave Traffic Act, which outlawed travel across state lines for prostitution. Heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson was the first person convicted under this law and actor Sir Charles "Charlie" Chaplin's career was tarnished after he was prosecuted and later aquitted of violating the act. Other notables listed in Wikipedia of being prosecuted under the act include Chuck Berry, Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Manson....Spitzer likely won't be prosecuted for that one but the people running the ring have been. Maybe Spitzer was secretly running his own undercover sting operation.....
In other New York news, it's being reported that negotiations are underway for the final game in Yankee Stadium....and it won't be baseball! The New York Daily News is reporting that the New York Rangers are negotiating to play an outdoor hockey game in the House that Ruth built.... 06 March A lazy blogger...Well I have received several comments concerning the fact that I haven't written anything, changed my music or added new photos in awhile. Guilty as charged! Working, getting outside since the weather is nicer and just doing other things lately. I have a very small following but you folks are loyal so I'll try and pick it up a little. Put some different songs up today but none of them are new, in fact they're some oldies but some different sides of my personality and tastes. Now if I can just think of something interesting to write about..... 03 March A Crappy Monday.... Okay it wasn't a dead body but it was still pretty nasty. I have today off since I worked over the weekend and was busy working on my tax return (oh joy) on a rainy Monday (double joy) while doing laundry and cleaning house. While the washing machine was on I walked into the bathroom and noticed that the toilet was beginning to overflow. The sewer was backing up into my bathroom. This happened once before when I was gone and it was a horrible surprise when I returned home to find my bathroom filled with sewage. Several hours of snaking drain pipes did virtually nothing and I paid a plumber to run a bigger, professional snake and saw down the pipe. Then he ran a camera down the pipe to show nothing was blocking it. Of course it cost me several hundred dollars to find out that nothing was blocking the pipe that time. So today I removed the toilet and snaked out the drain, poured liquid plumber down the pipe. Crawled under the house several times and removed cleanout valve and snaked it too. Poured buckets of water down the pipe and everything seemed to be fine but of course once I had the toilet back in place and turned on the sink and the shower at the same time, it started backing up again. By then it's after 5pm so I'm looking at emergency after hours rates when I think the basic rates start around $90 for a house call. Another great thing about scheduling a plumber is that while they're not as bad as the cable guy, you're never sure how long you'll have to wait for them. Oh happy day! 01 March A Nasty Discovery...Hey, I know....it's been a long time since I've written anything. Been working a lot lately and also trying to plan a big vacation in the near future. Nothing really that interesting to write about. Until tonight....My friend Ron, the friend with possibly the smallest house on Lake Washington called me up yesterday to tell me he had just helped pull a dead body out of the water near his neighbor's dock. Actually, the neighbor noticed the body and Ron went out in a rotton old rowboat and pushed the body into the dock with his boat, using a metal rake because he couldn't find the oars. I didn't even know that the boat would float and it weighs a ton, I don't know how he got it in the water.
Here's an article with a photo of the area: http://www.komotv.com/news/local/16132577.html
Ron's house is the little tiny one to the right of the big house with the red roof. Turns out the body was identified as a 40 year old male who was missing since December 27th. He's been in the water for awhile. Same water I did my polar bear swim in. Glad I didn't run into him then. Another interesting fact about Ron. He was one of the people who was seriously injured in the bombing incident at the Atlanta Olympic games....He's long since healed from that but yesterday was something else. |
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