BARLEY SERVICES: no ordinary plumber

I like to give God credit for things, but the word “miracle” is overused. If everthing is a miracle, then nothing is. If one says “I believe in miracles: I saw the sun rise this morning,” then he and the atheist both agree, for the atheist saw the sun rise as well.

It is difficult to define “miracle” because it involves certain presuppositions about God’s relationship to the universe. The Bible says that he upholds all things by the word of his power and that all things “hold together” by, or through, him. Yet a miracle goes beyond that, and I think a miracle is when God intervenes and does something that could not occur naturally.

If a sick person gets well, that’s not a miracle. But if he gets well in an instant, that’s a miracle. God usually answers prayer through providence rather than through miracles. If one is dying of cancer and God’s people pray seriously and the cancer goes into remission, that’s only a miracle if it conflicts with the large record of cases where other cancers have gone into remission. I’m not saying God didn’t do it, I’m saying that he did it through providence and not through miracle.

Why quibble? As I said at the beginning, if everything is a miracle, then nothing is. Unbelievers have a long history of laughing at believers because the believer experiences nothing unusual, but still calls it “God.” The believer is thanking God for a medical recovery and the doctor gets ignored along with the scientists who developed the effective medicines. The unbeliever thinks that there is nothing compelling in the believer’s worldview because he sees plainly that the believer is looking at nature and calling it supernatural.

If there is such a thing as nature, (and I think that there is), then those things which are within that realm need to be labeled as such, and “miracle” needs to be reserved to those phenomena which conflict with the natural order of things. Examples would be a storm ceasing suddenly when commanded to do so, a structural deformity in a human body being remedied instantly, or an uncanny coincidence in response to prayer such as an exact dollar amount arriving in the mail precisely in response to a specific need. Such timing and specificity may rise to the level of “miracle.”

A plumbing inspector failed me because I plumbed the job according to the Code book. Really, that’s what happened. It seems that there are three sets of rules by which we plumb in the Memphis area: (1) the Code book, (2) the “Blue Pages,” which are Shelby County’s amendments to the Code, and (3) an unwritten body of rules I’ll call “We’ve never allowed that.”

An inspector came to my job, looked at a certain joint, and said “You can’t use a 90 there; you have to use a long sweep.” That surprised me, so I got out the Plumbing Code and showed him the pertinent paragraph and asked “What does this mean right here?” (The book specifically said that I was correct.) He was surprised by what he saw, but he repeated “We’ve never allowed that.”

I decided to call the office where the top Code guys sit. “Mr. ____ tells me I cannot use a 90 to change from vertical to horizontal.” The Code official answered “We’ve never allowed that.” I protested “But the book says it’s legal.” All he could say was “Well, we’ve never allowed that.”

So I crawled under the house, cut out the 90, and replaced it with a long sweep. Nobody ever said the world was fair.

The long national nightmare is over.

The crisis has passed.

I’m back.

There has been a lot of water under the bridge since my last post nearly a year ago. And you see where the nation has gone since my absence. Coincidence? I think not!

This is the new blog with a new look and address. The old one was powered by Greymatter, fine software, but subject to exploits by porn-peddling spam-spewing pond scum. Greymatter is ancient history in the world of blog software and WordPress has a good reputation–so here we are. Maybe I’ll learn soon enough how to customize it.

Meanwhile, we need to resume issuing those correctives which, if adopted, will make the world a better, saner place. And tonight we begin with President Bush’s State of the Union Speech.

The nation has forgotten Reagan’s rhetoric: government isn’t the solution, it is the problem. To hear Bush speak is to hear about programs, initiatives, and funding–that is to say, more and bigger government. That’s all I’ll say. The implications are obvious and frightening to anyone who knows the history of what governments do.

In December of ’04 I wrote that Air Zimbabwe was going out of business because the Zimbabweans were now so thin, they could be faxed to their destinations. Well, things are no better today. One might have guessed it, of course, since it is still a Marxist nation. The NY times reported today:

“How bad is inflation in Zimbabwe? Well, consider this: at a supermarket near the center of this tatterdemalion capital, toilet paper costs $417. No, not per roll. Four hundred seventeen Zimbabwean dollars is the value of a single two-ply sheet. A roll costs $145,750 — in American currency, about 69 cents. The price of toilet paper, like everything else here, soars almost daily, spawning jokes about an impending better use for Zimbabwe’s $500 bill, now the smallest in circulation. But what is happening is no laughing matter. For untold numbers of Zimbabweans, toilet paper — and bread, margarine, meat, even the once ubiquitous morning cup of tea — have become unimaginable luxuries. All are casualties of the hyperinflation that is roaring toward 1,000 percent a year.”

Under “white minority rule” Rhodesia was the breadbasket of sub-Saharan Africa. Now they are starving.

Perhaps they will ask for handouts from non-Marxist, non-Black nations to keep from dying of starvation? But that would demonstrate who is superior to them. No, they couldn’t do that.

Could they?

The plumber-customer relationship includes a certain trust common to all professionals: the plumber is responsible to advise the customer honestly. When he does otherwise, he is dishonest. Such a principle precludes overselling.

I recently got a call from a man who said he needed his sewer replaced and asked if I did such work. After assuring him that I did, my first question was “How do you know that it needs to be replaced?” He answered that Leech Plumbing had told him so. (That’s not their real name, but it should be.)

To really shorten the story, I fixed his problem for $76, compared to the $4,000 that Leech quoted him. As I sat at his table, preparing to rake in my loot, I saw Leech’s invoice. They took $730 off this fellow a few nights earlier. Eliminating the useless work and charging my prices for the necessary work, I could have provided the same services for $140. More specifically, they charged him $300 for some extra work I would have thrown in for $40.

I went behind this same company a week earlier as well. They quoted a man $3,200 to replace his sewer. I quoted $1,500, and I would have made plenty of money at that price. Come to find out, it didn’t need replacing at all; Leech had misdiagnosed it.

On my company web site (see link on sidebar to the left) I have a page labeled “company philosophy” and it tells a story about Vampire Plumbing, another nest of bloodsuckers posing as professionals. I’m happy to report that Vampire closed its doors here in Memphis a few weeks ago.

AP news reports this morning that a bear attacked a family camped in Cherokee National Forest, killing a six-year-old girl and wounding others. The unhappy campers tried to beat the bear with sticks to drive it away, but the bear prevailed.

Why didn’t the father put a bullet into the bear’s skull and save the life of his daughter?

Federal law deems that, despite the right to keep and bear arms, and despite any legal permit you may have to carry your weapons, you cannot be armed legally in a national forest. You are at the mercy of any lawbreakers or bears who decide to feed upon you.

Isn’t it nice that Ol’ Massa is protecting us so well?

I realized a decade-long ambition today: I bought a Sears water hose. 😎

As a plumber for large shops, I used to visit about a thousand homes a year. Now, on my own, I make about 1/3 as many calls. Even still, for over sixteen years, I’ve been to a lot of homes and I’ve used a lot of water hoses. Never have I seen a hose that compares with the ones sold by Sears. They’re just good.

Can’t say as much for their legal, department, though. On the cardboard that came wrapped around my new hose, I found this on the inside:

“WARNING: Do not spray water into an electrical outlet. Severe electrical shock could result.”

By rights, other such warnings should be equally necessary. “Do not use this hose for colonic irrigation.” “Do not drive with this hose coiled around your head and eyes. You could have a wreck.” “Do not swing the end of this hose around when others are present. It could hit someone in the eye.” “Do not spray water on passing strangers. They could charge you with assault.”

We’re doomed, I tell ya. :angry:

According to the Washington Post, “Former D.C. mayor Marion Barry pleaded guilty yesterday to two misdemeanor tax charges, admitting in federal court that he failed to pay most of his income taxes for five years after departing from the District government in 1999.”

He faced a possible 18 months in jail and $30,000 in fines. He got probation, and he’s supposed to pay the taxes. That’s why he’s laughing.

Barry is a habitual offender: philandering, drugs, perjury, publicly exposing himself, nonpayment of debts. They arrest him, they convict him, they issue judgments against him–he doesn’t care or comply. He just gets a criminal underclass to vote him back into office for business as usual and dares anyone to enforce the law against him. That’s why he’s laughing.

He’s 70 and in poor health. If he can finish his current term, he can retire at taxpayer expense. Is this a great country, or what? If he dies, he gets by with a lifetime of living off the labor of others. (Of course, he then faces a holy God, but that’s another topic.)

Memphis can be proud when it looks at Barry–proud that it got rid of him fifty years ago. :laugh:

One doesn’t automatically think of concrete as something that can be sawed, but we do it all the time in the plumbing trade. In this photo you see me sawing a path through a driveway. We removed a 24″ swath, excavated beneath it, and laid a 3″ drain pipe.

This isn’t easy work. It takes a few hours to cut that much concrete, get it out, and haul it away. The circle saw blade you see in use here costs $350. We used up about 1/4 of its cutting edge on this job, including some cuts to the brick and sidewalk behind the house.

In Memphis, it is altogether too cold.

It’s so cold, the weather people can’t even tell how cold it is. When I checked the ‘net this morning, no two sources agreed, but they reported us being between ten and seventeen degrees. Southerners have way too much common sense to live in a place like that, but this weekend we’ve had no choice.

I had jobs yesterday, which is not always the case on Saturday. These jobs, as luck would have it, were outside. And they were hard. I was digging in the precipitation and the mud for six hours. Pity me, oh pity me, my readers.

See what it did to my truck? I wash that thing faithfully at least once every three months, and I happened to have washed it just this week. Now look! –>

Most of the churches in Memphis are closed this morning. I’m not sure why. At any rate, I’m home and blogging, furnace and fireplace operating at full tilt.

Alas! Relief is on the way. We just finished the warmest January in recorded history, and the high tomorrow is predicted to be 40. I suppose I can’t complain. But I will anyway: it is altogether too cold. :angry: