I went out yesterday evening to work on two fairly big units, which involved shutting a hospital down. I don’t like to inconvenience clients anyway but a hospital (well, it’s only a medical center these days) even less so, so I went after business hours, which didn’t give me a lot of daylight for working.

Now this particular client is part of the big site that I went to school to get the Specialist’s license to support, but who then screwed me over by not opening that part of the job for bids. That license came in handy this time though. These things hadn’t been touched in ten years that I know of, and not only were they not functioning, but they were both illegal installations. I may not have known that without that class. And since I’m the operator for that water district, I really need to know if things are correct or not.

I started taking one apart to fix it, but quickly determined that it was beyond hope. Even if I could get the smaller parts working, the large parts (and a 6-inch unit is heavy) would be broken too. Fixing one part of one of these units is generally almost as expensive as replacing the whole thing, and when you factor in the age and that I’ve never even heard of this manufacturer to get replacement parts, well then you might as well just call it a day. Besides having an illegal bypass that needed to be addressed.

I took a look at the other one, and it looked like it was in better shape, but then my lightbulb went on that this was the wrong kind of unit for the application. Not just wrong either, but also illegal. So I didn’t touch that one either to save the client the bill. All in all, I was out there for the better part of an hour and got completely filthy digging out a water valve with my hands, and don’t have one thing to bill for. I had my arm stuffed down in a valve box all the way to my armpit scooping out mud to get to the valve stem, while the hospital maintenance supervisor looked on and said he wouldn’t have touched that stuff with his bare hands. I told him at least it wasn’t date night, as I came up with another handful.

I was a little concerned when I called the client this morning. For some reason, I report to one guy for the operator stuff and another for the backflow stuff, and that guy is a little touchy to work with sometimes. I didn’t think he’d be thrilled that I’d refused to work on his units. I thought he would have wanted me to test them anyway and call them good. Which I can’t do, not ethically. Sure, he could call in someone else and would eventually find one who would do it, but my business is based on being right, not on being easy. And especially for my own water system, although I wouldn’t touch something like that for one of my cities either.

But he was OK with it. He said he’d get it taken care of, and I’ll go over with him what exactly he needs to do to get them in compliance. He’s going to save the two units for parts for me. It’s just another step in building my reputation. It seems like most of those steps are unbillable lately.

I really hope that this is the start of the rehabilitation of the whole place, even if that means a shit load of hard, ugly work for me. None of these units are newer than ten years old, and most of them have been painted over, frozen, and generally neglected during that time. There are going to be a lot of repairs needed to get the place going right, but this is the big job that could keep me on my feet when my day job goes away, so I will do anything honest to land it. Even if that does get me deep into the dirt now and then. What’s a little hard work?