BARLEY SERVICES: no ordinary plumber

I tend to stay on the trailing edge of technological development. I figure that the latest and greatest will always have bugs that need to be worked out, and I don’t care to be the exterminator. I stick with the old methods until the new ones become old. That way, I know that whatever I’m doing has already proved itself.

I have a house full of computers. Most of them were manufactured in the 1980s. They do a great job. For instance, the main machine in my office, with which I run my plumbing business, is a TRS-80 Model 4, slightly upgraded. It boasts 128K of RAM, a blinding clock speed of 4 MHz, two 720K floppies and two 360K floppies. I can dial up and connect to the university where I sometimes teach and, from there, access the Internet (text only). With that machine and others just like it, I produced all of my Ph.D. work in the ’90s.

I’m never one to stay in a rut, though, so I’ve made a recent breakthrough. I acquired a refurbished Palm IIIxe this week. Postage and all, it cost $35, which is about 10% of what the latest and greatest handhelds are running.

This quantum leap in equipment was occasioned by my recent addition of fifty blank 4×6 cards into the file drawer where I keep my job records. My original attitude, when I opened this business three years ago, was “Technology? We don’t need no stinkin’ technology.” I opted to implement the KISS system wherever possible: Keep It Simple, Sewerman. My to-do list was kept on a scrap of note paper in my shirt pocket and discarded at the end of the day. Shopping lists, reminders, notes from phone calls or conversations were all entered into a little notebook I kept in my hip or shirt pocket at all times. Jobs were written on 4×6 cards and tagged with a colored paper clip to signify status: scheduled, awaiting payment, postponed. Completed cards were filed by address and contained a record of what I did at that job, complete with any necessary drawings on the card. Plans for life in general went into a calendar made of blank 3-ring forms bought at the office supply store.

But when I added the last fifty cards into my file drawer, I began to face an ugly fact: that 12″ drawer is now full. I began three years ago with a small box for the job cards. Eventually I went to two boxes: A-L and M-Z. Then I moved to this big “recipe” file drawer. It works really well, especially since I drilled a hole in it and inserted a bolt which I can use as a lock to keep the drawer from sliding out of its case accidentally. But in a few weeks, that box will be obsolete.

You see, I have to take my job records into the house at night and back to the truck in the morning. If I left them in the truck and “something happened,” I’d lose a major feature in my customized, personalized customer service strategy: I know my customers and what I did at their homes. Lugging the big box isn’t too hard, once you learn how and where to grip it (along with the attache case, etc.) But two big boxes? It ain’t gonna happen.

To remain a one-man operation and to maintain close contact with my records, I figure I have to digitize. *sigh*

At first I tried to find a way to do it with the cell phone, but my phones just aren’t that sophisticated and I didn’t want to buy $500 worth of smartphone and accessories along with a big bill every month. So the $35 Palm IIIxe looked like a good place to start experimenting. With 8 megs of memory it can easily hold all of my job records, my customer database, and whatever accounting apps I might decide to run.

This model became passe over two years ago, so it’s just about my speed.

Yeah, one day I’ll rear back in my rocking chair and tell my great grandkids “back in ought-4, I got me my first handheld. You couldn’t talk to ’em; no sir; you had to poke ’em with a little plastic stick and write what you wanted ’em to do. And they didn’t know anything unless you wrote it in first. Had to put batteries in ’em every few weeks. Times were hard back then, yes sir . . . ”

Cats are strange. I’m not a cat lover, but some people are. They’re strange, too.

When I came home from work tonight, I parked my truck so that its headlights were shining on the curb across the street. I saw a cat playing with a mouse. He’d let it run in the gutter for a while, then chase and catch it.

Mouse didn’t seem to like it and ran out into the path of an oncoming car. Attempted suicide, I suppose. The front tire struck the mouse, it flipped up under the body of the car, then the rear tire struck it. I thought that the cat’s fun was over, but somehow the little mouse survived and the entertainment resumed. And you thought that you had a bad day?

Does any other animal kill and eat its playmates? If your dog did that, what would you think? Cat lovers, take heed.

“Is this Kevan Barley? Yes sir, Mr. Barley, I got your name from John Shelton. I’ve heard that you’re the finest plumber in Memphis and I need your help.” The voice on the telephone fairly danced with dynamism and enthusiasm. After a few minutes I said “You’re Ed McAteer, aren’t you?” He seemed a little taken aback and asked if we’d done business before. After all, at his age, memory isn’t what it used to be. I answered “No, sir, it’s just that you are a public figure and nobody else I’ve ever heard speaks with such leadership in his voice. It’s hard NOT to know that it’s Ed McAteer.”

That’s how I met him: I cleaned out his sewer line. As time passed, I’d do several other plumbing jobs at his house. He called once and began by saying “I told someone just the other day that Kevan Barley cannot quite walk on water, but I’ve never seen him more than two inches deep, and he knows where all the rocks are!” I could tell that it was a line he’d used many times before, but I still appreciated the compliment.

Ed was famous for the coalitions he built. He was a “natural salesman” who believed deeply in the fundamentals of the Christian faith and the literal interpretation of Bible prophecy, particularly the prophecies about the nation Israel. He therefore created and led organizations dedicated to advancing those beliefs. I never heard anyone question his integrity, and I never saw anything in him that fell short of absolute commitment to truth. From where I sat, I believe that he had one passion: Jesus Christ as savior of the world.

The Left despised him, called him “the godfather of the religious right.” Who knows what dreams passed through their minds of how beneficial he’d be if only he were on their side instead of on ours? Ed was a man of rare abilities and rare commitment. He made a powerful impact upon his generation.

He collapsed at his home here in Memphis this past Tuesday; died “all at once,” as it were. He was only 78, but at the speed at which he thought and talked and worked, he probably got 120 years of living crammed into those 78.

His funeral is Friday, 10 AM, at the 28,000-member Bellevue Baptist Church, which is in sight of my home. I won’t make it, though. I’ve made too many promises to customers and will be gone plumbing.

But he’ll do fine without me. I suspect that the huge auditorium will be packed with his other friends. I’ll just wait and catch up with him later.

Shalom, Ed.

Terri Schiavo, severely disabled, has been in the news for months and months. Her poor husband Michael wants to kill her and mean people like Gov. Jeb Bush won’t let him.

The courts have now struck down “Terri’s Law,” the Florida measure that tried to restrict a husband’s right to terminate an unwanted marriage. With a little luck, she’ll be dead in no time.

My concern here, though, is not with Michael’s right to bump off his wife. I think more attention needs to be paid to the humanitarian side of things. The executioners intend to withold water until she dies of thirst. This just isn’t right. Dying of thirst is a slow and tortuous way to go. Terri is fully conscious and aware of what’s going on.

The Muslims have a much better method: saw her head off! She’ll be gone in seconds, almost no pain at all, and Michael can get on with his life. Of course, he should be awarded the privilege of dispatching her with his own hands, since he’s had to work so hard for so long to protect his rights as a husband.

The first debate of this presidential race took place last night. Pundits are unanimous that one candidate totally ran away with the victory and left the other in the dust. They just can’t agree on which candidate that was.

I don’t own a T.V., so I listened to the debate via streaming media on my computer. I didn’t get the visual effects–the expressions, etc.–so I had to concentrate on what was said.

Kerry is a better debater than Bush is. That’s really all you can learn from these events. Bush isn’t glib; he doesn’t “think on his feet” well. None of that has anything to do with running the executive branch of the federal government.

There’s a superstition that is nearly universal: debates show who’s correct. I call it a superstition because there’s no evidence for it. A person can be categorically wrong and know he’s wrong and still whip the stuffing out of his opponent if he holds all of the debating talent. Something like that goes on in courtrooms thousands of times a day right here in the land of justice for all. Have you ever been in a courtroom trial? Heh heh, I rest my case. You know I’m right.

Bush will carry Tennessee handily, barring some upheaving catastrophe between now and Nov. 2d. In fact, I expect him to win by a landslide across the country, and I’ve been saying it all year. That means I’m hardly a hero for putting a Peroutka sign in my yard today. Michael Peroutka is the Constitution Party presidential candidate. In not supporting Bush, I’m really taking no risks. If any fellow conservative attacks me, I have an easy dodge: “Hey, Kerry can’t win Tennessee.” Not every Peroutka supporter has it so easy.

9/11 seems to have changed everything. Among my friends, Bush can do no wrong. A “third party” is unthinkable, almost like supporting a different god than the one in the Bible. But there are some serious issues that we need to come to grips with. I’ll name one: abortion. We antiabortion folks get the Republicans’ rhetoric, the kids get the garbage disposal. Eight years of Reagan, four years of Poppa Bush, four years of little Bush, and where are we in the battle, hmm? And there are many other important issues where, despite the image which the Republicans project to us, they can be counted on to split the difference with the left when the radials meet the road.

But most conservatives begin shaking in rage when they see another conservative not supporting Bush. Hopefully better times and deeper thinking will return soon.

Three years ago, when I opened my plumbing business, I needed a cell phone. (Now, since the technology isn’t necessarily cellular, they’re called “mobile” phones.) Choosing a provider was like exploring an uncharted jungle. It required great powers of analysis to construct an apples-to-apples comparison of what was being offered. Most irritating was the fact that the various companies were obscure deliberately.

I was equal to the task, though, and I ultimately went with SunCom, a fancy name for AT&T, which was just about the biggest and most reliable option I found. I got 1,000 anytime minutes for $55/month, plus all the little add-on fees.

It’s been okay. I have discovered on the Internet that everyone has gripes against his mobile phone company, and mine are no different from others, except for one annoying point: roaming!

I can be in the middle of Memphis and unable to hit an AT&T tower. Wham: sixty cents a minute. Being in the plumbing business, I have little choice as to whether or not I’m going to talk on that phone. End of the month, another $5 or so tacked onto the bill. But what’s money to a plumber, right?

It’s the principle of the thing. :rolleyes:

Last November a law was passed that makes your number portable; that is, you can go to another company and take your same phone number with you. I was promising to do exactly that last year, but I waited a month or two to let them iron the bugs out of the transferral system, then I had a month or two with no roaming, then I got busy — ah, you know the drill. I just let it go.

Well, yesterday I finally did something about it: I moved to T-Mobile. I have the same 1,000 minutes, but at $40 instead of $55. There are NO ROAMING charges and free long distance. I paid a $35 activation fee and got a “free” Nokia 6010 handset, a quantum upgrade from my old Motorola V120c.

This is how the free market works. AT&T tried mightily to keep me, but they just couldn’t do it. T-Mobile simply had a better deal. They got me on a one-year contract. At the end of that year, if they haven’t kept pace with their competition, they’ll lose me the same way that AT&T did.

Technology is becoming cheaper; these companies’ sales volume is increasing all the time; everybody just has to have that mobile phone; and yet, for all that, the prices have only barely come down in three years. AT&T doesn’t have a single offer on their web site that’s any better than the one I got from them three years ago. Among phone users, the pressure is increasing to drive prices down. The high prices cannot be sustained against such pressure (unless the government steps in and forces people to pay higher prices). Step by step, companies that cannot compete will be marginalized in the phone market.

Can you hear me now?

A lady had a big problem and got a big plumbing company to give her a bid on fixing it. They told her $6,200. She called me and I went by and took a look. It looked more like $4,500 to me, and she was greatly relieved. She wanted me to do the work, but felt that she had to honor her invitations to two other contractors who were yet to come by. I encouraged her to do just that, confident that the others couldn’t beat my price. I thought that I had the job in the bag, but she called this week and said that company XYZ had made her an offer so low she couldn’t pass it up, so she was getting them to do the work.

I don’t know XYZ’s price, but it must have been close to $3,500-$4,000. How does this happen? How can contractors have such disparate pricing?

1. GREED. The $6,200 quote was largely greed. The one making that offer was fishing for whales. A big company has many opportunities to make offers on jobs and occasionally some sucker will accept the bid. The men then make $1,000/day. You have to admit, it sure beats driving all over town tinkering with rotten pipes in slummy shacks for a few bucks per job.

2. OVERHEAD. A big company simply cannot work as cheaply as a small one can. The $6,200 company has layers of management all the way up to the home office “up north,” as well as stockholders who “deserve a return on their investment.” (The corporate bigwigs are the biggest stockholders.) Massive levels of insurance coverage, big equipment, lawsuits, office staff and computers, recruiting and training, buildings, etc. all drive their costs through the roof.

3. UNCERTAINTY. On a big job, you never really know just what you might run into. This particular job required sawing 100 feet of concrete, opening a couple of walls, and digging through a yard to an as-yet-unknown depth. Various mishaps could add a day or two to the job. A contractor needs to split the difference between “covering himself” in case of miscalculations and “fishing for whales” with no regard for the customer’s right to a fair price.

4. HUNGER. When a plumber doesn’t have enough business to pay his bills, he become a lot less picky. He’s willing to work at nearly any price. A company that has men sitting around with no work to do is a company that’s willing to cut the price to rock bottom.

5. SKULDUGGERY. I sure hope there’s no skulduggery in this lady’s job. Those who underbid me are certainly a larger company than I am (since I’m a one-man band), so they have greater overhead. I’m not sure how they beat me. Either they are much more confident in their work and figured the price with no elbow room, or they plan to do it in a cheaper way and haven’t revealed that to her. Or maybe they plan to come back in the middle of the job and claim that things are different than what they originally bid on, and now they need to add $X to the price.

It’s a common practice for a contractor to use sly methods of squeezing more profit from a job. He quotes it low in order to get the business, then he makes his money by cutting corners or by manipulating the situation. Hey, if your driveway was unusable and your yard was torn up and your plumbing wouldn’t work, how willing would you be to send a company packing so that you could return to the Yellow Pages and start trying to find a replacement? Many a customer just pays the higher price in order to be done with the skunks and to get them off the property.

I’m not at all certain that there will be anything wrong with the work this company will do. Maybe they just did a better job at estimating and they outbid me fair and square. I sure hope so.

My wife and I just celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary by making a quick getaway to Mountain View, Arkansas. It’s about three hours from Memphis, but it’s like going to another world and another time.

What’s different? It’s like stepping back in time to when people were a community. There’s almost no major crime. There’s not been a murder in five years. You can walk downtown without some dopehead mugging you. In fact, every night people go out to the square around the County Courthouse and sit around picking bluegrass music. You can walk around from group to group and listen, sing along, or sit in on the session.

I could write about Mountain View for days. Just go! You’ll see.

On my web site, I posted a link to an outfit called truecatholic.org, which features the real pope, who lives not in Rome, but in Springdale, Washington. Well, I now find that I only scratched the surface. Here’s a site that lists seventeen claimants to the papal chair. And there are a number of others who intend to be pope sometime in the future. :doze:

I haven’t been blogging much of late. My spare time has been taken up with writing on the Catholic Answers Forums. If you have any interest in seeing what I’ve written there, this link will take you to a list of my posts.

These debates are a world all their own. The contestants exhibit a wide range of emotions. They accuse one another of the very errors they, themselves, are committing in logic, research, fairness, and every other topic. They misquote one another and misconstrue perfectly clear sentences. They make authoritative statements about things they’re totally ignorant of. They’re blinded by self-interest.

And that’s just the ones who agree with me! 😛