I wonder if he got a second day.
Making mistakes builds character. I predict this boy will have lots and lots of character.
I was an apprentice plumber who burnt down a house. This is how it happened.
The winter of 1984 I was the first female plumber to work for the Warm Guys. It was a union Plumbing & Heating shop in Anchorage, Alaska. I got to work at 8am that Monday morning and the boss told me to go down to the historic cabin on 15th we had been working on and thaw out the pipes. I thawed out the pipes alright. By 9am I was calling the Fire Dept. Ten minutes later they arrived to flames shooting out of the windows. Total loss. What the fire did not burn down the firemen axed down.
I called my boss right after I called the Fire Dept and told him that I did what he told me to. He’d said he thought the water lines were frozen where the water line came in under the kitchen sink. He said hit that with a torch which I did. Some wood shavings must have fell down the hole and ignited. When smoke started coming up I poured water down the hole to no avail. I then immediately went outside and pulled the plunger on the gas line coming to the house to stop the flow. By then smoke was coming out the windows. This was before cell phones so I ran down the street to the Stew House and called the Fire Dept from their pay phone.
When the boss got there he said he had another job for me since I liked to burn so much. The job was burning out an old boiler in a church downtown , piece by piece, and carry them out. The boiler had been set in the basement and the church built over it. That was a hot sweaty back breaking job. Took me and 2 other warm guys a week.
Heard later the owner of the historic cabin wanted to shake my hand. Seems insurance covered it (fires started by plumbers are not uncommon) and the property was worth way more than the cabin on it.
Another time on a job my journeyman started a fire behind the drywall of a 3 story lived in apartment building. I got to pull the fire alarm on that one. It was the same firemen and they thought I’d started it. The journeyman was nervous about it and I told him “your not a plumber til you burn something down!” :eek:
I have to admire your ability to admit a screwup and do so publicly.
Wow yola, so you and the guy in the OP’s link are like soulmates!
I did feel someone had to stick up for shit people do.
Life is shitty sometimes.
Off the record I’m not a plumber any more. My guess is the OPs plumber got fired cashing two checks. One for the week the employer held back and another for the hours spent that week.
In other words shitted on.
Looks like that plumber’s job is in the toilet now.
Obviously, yola has character!
He literally torched a house?
Bet he was sweating more than pipes.
I used to work for an insurance company that specialized in insuring residential contractors. I once adjusted a loss where plumbers sweating pipes not only set the house they were working on ablaze, the fire spread to 3 other homes. Wind blew the fire from one house to the next. It was an entire neighborhood of new homes outside Atlanta.
But let’s not single out the plumbers. Hardwood floor finishers and painters are as bad if not a worse than plumbers. Floor finishers sand between coats of polyurethane. If they leave that dust swept up in a pile it will spontaneously ignite. Painters who wad up rags soaked in mineral spirits another common cause.
I know all these things from experience. I’ve sent the results of nearly 100 house fires. I studied chemistry. None of this prevented me from nearly burning down my own house, by putting a rag soaked in linseed oil into a cardboard box. I’d been finishing a piece of furniture I’d just made. 10 minutes latter still in the garage I’m wondering what that smell is and why my eyes were burning. Then suddenly I knew. One of those instances where the circumstantiates of an impending disaster crystallize in an instant. I managed to grab the box, almost to hot to touch and rush it outside. As I dumped its contents out it caught fire. Luckily there was no property damage and all the evidence of my utter stupidity was consumed in the fire.
I said:
Looks like that plumber’s job is in the toilet now!
::tap tap tap:: Is this thing on?
::crickets chirping::
Maybe if you were Jake to good humor you’d have told another joke in loo of the one you did? Face it, you’re no W.C. Fields.
::::rimshot::::
::groan::
I said that because come on, how many people burn down a house as one of their first deeds on a new job? It’s quite a thing to have in common.