Positively Draining - Plumbing the depths of your pocket for Plumbers
There has been a trend of academic professionals chucking in their jobs and taking up highly paid positions elsewhere. Does that mean we will begin to hear about Stockbrokers who know their Socrates from their Chaucer or Oil Rig Engineers technicians who can also diagnose mononucleosis?
No indeed! Professionals have been retraining as none other than plumbers due to a shortage of tradesmen and the high fees charged when self employed.
Indeed even stockbrokers themselves have been lured by big pay packets to become plumbers and are taking up the plunger and wrench.
There are not many other more unsavoury jobs than plumbing surely? ....Aside from maybe being consigned to a life as a Hindu untouchable and spending life ostracized and spending every day doing the most awful tasks in society: street cleaning, handling the dead and tanning leather.
This morning the plumber came to my apartment because of some complication with the waste drains.
As a plumber he spends his life handling human waste right down to human hair and women's toiletries.
While I endeavoured to eat my breakfast, he kindly regaled me with the ultimate icebreaker - tales of what one finds in blocked sanitation units and how to sieve and chop your way through blockages...
More Vegemite on toast?
Watching him work, it struck me how laissez-faire he was with the filth he was handling without gloves nor grimace.
Impressed, I remarked that I hoped he was paid enough "danger money".
And here's the rub - he apparently earns close to £1,000 a week or nearly US$2,000... Why?
Well apart from having had to train for 4 years (again why would a professional wish to spend all that time retraining?), they are in short supply in the UK. They face getting sued if the job is done poorly and especially in cold climes, it must be terrible working in freezing winter weather.
Furthermore it must be positively draining, dealing with stressed people whose toilet has flooded the kitchen.
But it is an important job. I just don't see how miserable you'd have to be as a doctor, teacher or academic to be up to your armpits in other people's excrement.
Certainly the Romans valued plumbers very highly. Indeed they had great skills in moulding and soldering lead pipes and guttering as well as the engineering required to make the aqueducts, sewers and running water to fountains. In fact the Latin word Plumbum means "lead". Some villas in Pompeii had as much as 30 taps!
At least the role of the modern plumber is not as bad as the work of a Medieval leather tanner who used dog sh!t to treat leather.
The canine faeces was, I understand, mixed with brains and lovingly massaged by some poor soul into leather to make it into armour and shoes and saddles.
The mix of crap was ironically called Pure and in London the Pure Gatherers or Pickers were those who poop-scooped all day; the end result visible in everyday leather goods.
Nice.
Now that really has to have been the worst job and certainly put the plumber's job into context.
I doubt there'd be many professionals retraining for that little gig!
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