Thursday, January 13, 2011

Protective gear? We don't need no stinkin' protecitve gear

The hot water main broke in my bathroom.  It had been poorly installed and when the plumber tried to shut off the water for a remodel project, the faucet came off in his hand and hot water started gushing everywhere. After shutting off the building’s hot water and dismantling the entire bathroom they set out to fix the pipes.  They broke through the tile and changed the pipes and faucet, which introduces the video below.  The elderly plumber doing the work installed a complex system of connecting pipes. Each connection had to be sealed with a solder-like metal.  He called it solder, and since I don’t know solder from salad I believed him. He heated the pipe and melted copious quantities of solder on the connection.  Then he heated the solder and smoothed it out with a wet rag.  Yes a wet rag! There is nothing but a rag between this man’s fingers and molten metal.  The searing sound you hear in the video is the rag against the hot metal, it could just as easily be human flesh against molten metal. (I refer you back to the man dangling out of my window to install a housing unit around the air conditioner.)  Safety, what safety?  Protective gear? We don’t need no stinkin' protective gear, we got a wet rag!     Also note the baseball cap instead of face shield… very stylish!

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