Chapter 17

Desperately Seeking Plumbing

PARISIAN PLUMBERS, like the majority of people in France’s so-called service industry, are a recalcitrant mob. They will work only the hours they want to work, keep a careful cap on the number of certified professionals they will allow into the industry, and remain supremely indifferent to the greater populace’s need for such basic sanitation requirements as a properly flushing toilet.

In my first two years in Paris, ranks of Polish plumbers had piled across the French border desperate to find work and keen to get their hands on Paris’s sewer system. But the French plumbers’ union and the French government seemed to expend an inordinate amount of effort on keeping them at bay—a cruel irony, it seemed to me. Their argument, as best as I could understand it, was that Polish plumbers had no right to practice their trade in France because they did not over-charge, were prepared to work at all hours of the day or night, and hence were about to ruin what was an otherwise finely tuned industry. It was an argument that found little favor with me at the best of times, and one that I came to disagree with violently when the pipes in the bathroom of my seventeenth-century apartment decided to pack it in.

My close encounter with the Parisian plumbing fraternity came one mid-September morning. I was rudely awakened by a loud knocking on my door. My neighbor from downstairs—a woman who, despite having lived downstairs for over two years, had never seen fit to share more than three words of conversation with me—now stood on my doorstep speaking rapid-fire French and gesticulating wildly. Still dazed from my exertions on a Petit Fer à Cheval barstool the night before, I stood in my boxer shorts, scratching my stomach and yawning, trying to take it all in.

Previous experience with random French people banging down my door to scream at me in rapid-fire French had taught me simply to thank them very much for dropping by, close the door, and crawl back into bed. However, Madame Downstairs was not to be so easily deflected. A strange brown stain was forming on her living room wall, she said, and she wanted something done about it. Fast. It only took a relatively brief, and wholly reluctant, walk downstairs to her apartment to see that something of mine—most probably my toilet, given the color of the stain—was leaking into her living room.

Time to call the plumber, I thought to myself.

 

MY LAST ENCOUNTER with the French plumbing profession had been almost a year before—and the scars had only just healed. On that occasion my water heater had given out completely. It was midwinter, and as a reasonable, albeit relatively naïve, human being, I expected the problem would be fixed posthaste. I called the plumber. After a one-sided conversation in which he explained to me how busy he was, how people couldn’t just expect him to drop everything and come running every time they had a plumbing problem (I thought it best not to point out that in fact, technically, that was his job), we managed to find a time and date in his work calendar that apparently did not interfere with his busy social life. The rendezvous was set for ten days hence.

I was gobsmacked. How could anyone be expected to live in an apartment, in the middle of a Parisian winter, with neither heat nor hot water? It was beyond me. Surely the UN Commissioner on Human Rights had been called to intervene in lesser crimes. But neither the plumber nor my landlady could comprehend the urgency of my situation. Apparently it was perfectly acceptable for a tenant to go for two weeks without heat or hot water. And no, of course there was no question of a reduction in rent. The hot-water heater had broken down because of misuse. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that it hadn’t been replaced or serviced since Napoleon got his comeuppance at Waterloo.

During the ten days of personal hygiene purgatory that ensued, I joined the relatively large community of fellow showerless souls at the local gym. We would gather there immediately after work, make no pretense of the fact we were in the gym only to avail ourselves of the showering facilities, and give each other a nod of solidarity as we went about our ablutions. Brothers in filth.

When finally the happy day arrived for Monsieur le Plombier to come and assess the parlous state of my water heater, he arrived at my door without so much as a wrench in hand. Standing before my dormant water heater, he folded his arms and nodded sagely, before telling me it was broken.

“So can you fix it?” I asked, in what I assumed was a redundant question.

It was all he could do not to laugh. He gravely informed me that to fix the water heater he would require his tools, which he patently did not have upon him. I was too confused to be able to openly wonder exactly what was the point of a plumber coming to visit a client without his tools. What did he think he was coming to do? Shoot the breeze? Have a quick cup of coffee before moving on and imposing his impotence on the next unsuspecting victim? As it was, ten days of risking athlete’s foot in the gym showers had drained me of energy. I was dirty and broken. He had me exactly where he wanted me.

When finally he did return, one whole week later, it was with his tools and a hefty invoice for services barely rendered.

 

AND SO HERE I WAS AGAIN. Almost one year since my last encounter with the French plumbing industry, I was about to throw myself at its mercy once more. Given the speed with which the rest of the country embraced progress and change, I was fairly confident that this impending brush with French plumbers was once again going to leave me in the shit. The fact that we were on the cusp of one of France’s infamous stretches of public and religious holiday marathons would serve only to alter the depth.

True to form, all three of the so-called “emergency” plumbers I called professed an inability to attend, each of them citing a too-heavy workload. While I was on the phone to one of them, listening to him tell me how he was up to his elbows in attending an emergency call outside Paris, I couldn’t help but hear in the background the final boarding call for the Air France flight to Nice. The slimy bastard was scarpering to the seaside like the rest of Paris, leaving me sans toilette for at least six days.

There was nothing for it but to draw up a strategic pooing plan. Number twos would be restricted to lunchtime and late evenings, when I was most likely to find myself at work or at a café or bar. Number ones would have to be spread carefully around the neighborhood, at any one of the several cafés in my immediate vicinity. I had it down to a tee. By rotating the cafés I frequented over the six-day period, and by carefully selecting only those whose facilities were at the back of the establishment and hence far removed from the prying eyes of suspicious service staff, I managed to evade detection. Not so among my friends, however, to whom I soon became known as the “phantom pooer.” My plight became so well known in my close circle that inquiries would be made at dinner parties as to when I had last had a movement. Perhaps not surprisingly, invitations to dinner dried up noticeably around this period.

Just as I was starting to run out of accommodating café owners, the plumbers of Paris returned en masse from their mid-June sabbatical. Relaxed and tanned from their sojourns on Côte d’Azur beaches, they suddenly found time in their busy schedules to attend to my broken pipes. By the time a hulking mass of conspicuously tanned plumbing expertise finally deigned to pay a visit to my apartment, I had been sans toilette for a grand total of fifteen days. I had spent more than two exhausting weeks strategically planning every call of nature.

It took him all of seven minutes to arrive at my apartment, saunter into my bathroom, and change a washer on the cistern. That he charged me a hundred euros for the privilege and then sauntered back out was almost more than I could bear. As he closed the door behind him, I stood dumbstruck in my living room, unsure whether to feel shame at having not had the wherewithal to change a washer (what would my DIY-obssessed father say?) or anger at having had to wait two weeks for it to be done. Finally I figured there was nothing to do but laugh. If nothing else, the experience had allowed me to get to know the proprietors of every café within a fifty-yard radius of my apartment.

Besides, it was not as if I had come to expect anything else from that great oxymoron, the French service industry. In a country where shop assistants could rarely be bothered to look up from whatever magazine they were reading, much less serve you, a two-week wait for a flushing toilet was probably not unreasonable. In a nation where subscribers to an Internet service provider were regularly overcharged, arbitrarily denied access to the Internet, and then expected to pay an exorbitant per-minute rate when they phoned to complain, it was probably to be expected. And in a city where you were expected to pay a princely sum for a stuffy waiter at an overpriced café to treat you like dirt, it wasn’t the least bit surprising.

I was fast learning that when it came to customer service in France, I could either accept that the customer was never right, or I could go slowly, painfully mad. Launching a one-man campaign to try to reeducate an entire country was fruitless and foolhardy.

“Do you understand what is meant by the expression customer service?” I would scream down various phone lines. “I am the client, you are the service provider. You are supposed to be providing a service to me.” This regular rant was almost always met with indifferent silence on the other end of the premium-rate line. They were, after all, paid handsomely to be infuriatingly unhelpful. The longer you stayed on the line fuming, the more money they made. You could almost hear them filing their nails out of abject boredom on the other end of the line.

Quiet acceptance of the utter inefficiency and infuriating illogicality of it all was the only way forward. France had been here longer than I had, and it wasn’t about to change its habits—no matter how unhygienic—just because I didn’t like them.