There Are Three Kinds Of Pipe!

Does this look familiar?



It has been in my dreams/nightmares for a while now. APPARENTLY there are one or two things that, even if you can do it by yourself, you shouldn’t. Moving your gas meter is one of them. Living in a big city and all, and having the bureaucratic behemoth Con Edison as your service provider are two strikes against the little guy—the scrappy do-it-yourselfer. A certain meter reader, who was allowed to live, (he probably had kids, or at the minimum, a mother) raised an eyebrow or ten when he read the meter mid December. He muttered something about, “looks like a landlord job to me”, and added smarmily that he hoped this was registered with the city.

REGISTERED WITH THE CITY!!

Not five minutes later the nightmares began, even though I was wide-awake. Several phone calls were made to friends and friendly contractors before I got on the line, Scarponi plumbing. They had done the plumbing on a bathroom that I remodeled a couple of years ago and I liked the guys they sent (as much as you can like a plumber). Bill, the owner listened to my plight, chuckled and said, “you’ve got yourself in a bucket of sh_t”, adding, “Con ed are motherf__ers”. I knew I was in good hands. We settled on a price. (ouch!!) And so began the painstaking process of getting the thing legit. I had to take down a couple of cabinets, open a couple of holes in the ceiling and wait. They applied to the city for a permit (two weeks) then they showed up and changed a shut-off valve that I had left in place, and installed this new “meter bar” that con ed now requires. I had just put the old meter back in line, but NO!

Get this. The shut-off valve that they replaced was very near the riser (the pipe that ‘rises’ from the basement and feeds all the “D line” apartments). I didn’t change it because you would have to shut off the entire riser to accomplish this. And that’s bad because you have to have access to all the effected apartments to re-light pilot lights and make sure the pressure was restored properly. HUGE HEADACHE! So Bill’s son takes a look and says, “Ah, no problem, I’ll just change it out real quick”. He loosens the valve, then unscrews it completely and sticks his thumb in the pipe! Then he paints the threads around his thumb with pipe dope, and with the new valve in his other hand, pulls his thumb out and quickly screws on the valve! We heard the hiss of the gas for a few seconds and that was that.

Then they set a date and time with Con Edison for an inspection. Half the time they show, half the time they don’t. Thankfully they didn’t because there was a very real possibility that, given the nasty version of an inspector, I would have had to remove many more cabinets and rip into many more ceilings and walls to expose the run of pipe. Since they didn’t show the plumber (who has a license, go figure) is allowed to ‘self certify’. They checked everything out and all my work passed all the pressure tests etc. So now all I have to do is call Con Edison to get them to install a new meter! I’ll let you know how long that takes.

When dealing with plumbers I am always reminded of an extremely funny scene in MOONSTRUCK, the film with Cher and a young and unspoiled Nicholas Cage, where Cher’s father, played by the late great Vincent Gardenia pulls up in front of a brownstone. Two painters in splattered whites, carrying gear and ladders are coming down the front steps. Cosmo Castorini (Gardenia’s character) gets out of his Lincoln town car and bounds up the steps, past the painters, dressed in a sports jacket and tie. One painter turns to the other and says, “I should have been a plumber”. CUT TO: Cosmo, sitting on the toilet scraping the exposed waterline with a nickel. He turns to the terrified yuppie couple huddled in the doorway, and with an authoritative boom announces, “there are three kinds of pipe!” The couple now knows that they will soon be hemorrhaging money.