Wednesday, May 7, 2008

The price of knowledge

(aka Battle of the Bulge, part II)

"Knowledge is power"
FRANCIS BACON, Meditationes Sacrae

So the guy turned up, crawled under the sink with some plumbing tools and ten minutes later, "Tada!". I handed over 70 smackeroons and bingo, job done.

My good mood lasted about as long as it had taken him to fix the leak. Sure, I saved £130 compared to the other guy who had wanted to rip out the kitchen sink unit. On the other hand it only took him ten minutes. That's £420 per hour. Nice work if you can get it.

I took a good look at what he had done. He seemed to have grafted a section of pipe in place of the bulging lead pipe. He obviously had some kind of special tool to graft a section of copper pipe to the lead pipe. I could not have done that. But perhaps I could learn.



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