Plumber

On Sunday morning, Barb talked to our neighbour, Wayne, about our flooded basement and he told Barb that his basement had flooded a few years back and it cost $25,000 to get it fixed but his insurance paid for it.  So Barb borrowed his phone because our phone was not hooked up yet and phoned our insurance company.  She talked to the answering service and they asked her to give a number where she could be reached so that the insurance adjuster could phone her back.  But she didn't know our neighbour's phone number and had to rush around to find out what it was.

Then she phoned the plumber that our neighbour had used.  The plumber said that we should try switching the two cords coming out the sump dump to see whether the problem was the pump or the water level indicating arm.  So Barb went down in the crawl space while talking to the plumber on the phone and when she got half way across the basement the phone died because it was out of range from our neighbour's house.  She switched the plugs and the sump dump came on and started pumping water out of the basement.  So the sump pump did work but we would have to sit there pulling out the plug to let the water fill up and plugging it in again to get the sump pump to pump it out again all day to get the water out of the basement.

So Barb phoned the plumber back and asked him to come over and replace the sump pump.  He said since it was a Sunday he would charge us double time from the time he left his house and he had to go in to the office to get the truck and then drive to our house.  Barb said okay and he came and replaced the sump pump with a new one.  When he was finished, he came into our kitchen and tried to sell us a generator or something in case the power went out and even a backup sump pump.  Barb asked a lot of questions and then when he was writing up the bill, Barb realized that the whole time he was in the kitchen was counting as work time and he was charging us double time.  Then he told us he had to round up to the closest half hour.  Barb was pissed at herself for wasting his time.  He said he didn't know the whole bill and that we would get an invoice in a couple of days by email.  When we got the bill, it was over $500 but Barb was happy that he didn't round up the half hour.