Talk to the Plumber
Decades ago, I was visiting my uncle, who was old and frail. The sink in his kitchen wasn’t working, so I called a plumber for him. It was near the end of the working day, so the plumber was kind to make a stop at my uncle’s place. I was sitting on the porch when he arrived, with my uncle and an elderly woman who lived up the road and had come to visit. I went out to meet the plumber in the driveway, introduced myself, and shook hands. He said, “You know I used to come here with my father when I was still an apprentice.” I said, “Well, I guess the place hasn’t changed much. Come on in–the kitchen is just to the right.” The plumber said hello to my uncle and his guest and we went into the house.
He paused just inside the screen door. “Yep–it all looks the same. I remember wondering if these windows were original to the house when it was first built”–he pointed toward some windows in the dining room that had wonderfully antique-looking wavy glass. “I don’t know, ” I said. “But here’s the sink–the leaks are around both faucets.” The plumber said, “So, you’re taking care of the old man, I guess.” “Yes, well, there’s no one else, really,” I said. “Thanks for stopping by so late.” And I went back out on the porch.
The old lady–Mrs. McDade was her name–whispered to me to sit down next to her. When I did, she said quietly, “He wanted to talk a little more with you. ” I said, “Yeah, I know, but, well–you’re here and it would be great just to get the sink fixed.”
She said, “If you ever own a house, the first thing you should know is that you have to talk to the plumber.”
This incident has stayed with me ever since, and over the next few years, espcially after my uncle died and left his house to me, I began to talk to the plumber, the contractor, the cable guy, the air-condioner installer, and so on as much as they wanted to. Mrs. McDade was right. You expect courtesy and respect when you are working for someone else, and you should extend the same courtesy to anyone tradesman/woman who is working for you. Especially if you are professionally or financially “above” them, to treat them brusquely or even briskly is rude and implies that you are better than they are and that your time is more valuable than theirs.
If they want to pass the time of day for a few minutes, pass the time of day with them. It will actually save you time in the long run, if you must look at it that way, because the service you get will be better and more reliable than it would be otherwise, and the person doing the work will be more likely to respond to any emergency in the future. But mainly, it is simply a decent thing to do, just as the plumber’s talking to me was simply the decent thing to do, though I was too young, too new at life to recognize that. As Ann Landers once said, of herself, “Better than nobody, nobody better.” So if the plumber wants to tell you that his first kid just went off to college, talk to the plumber.
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Missing from this vignette is that one might talk with (not “to”) the plumber, etc. because they WANT to (social intercourse with a fellow human), not just because it may generate better service (selfish interest) or because it’s the right thing to do (duty).
Dan, I happen to be in the middle of A Good Talk right now and am greatly enjoying it. I wondered yesterday if people at the adjacent table at a coffee shop were noticing my intermittent chuckles while reading.
Dear Jeff Stone,
Your point about “talk to” and “talk with” is an interesting one. “Talk with” seems to me a modern locution, perfectly honorable and maybe quite useful, but “talk to” has for a long time, maybe until this more recent coinage, meant “talk with” as well as “address.” When someone says “I love talking to him,” you know it doesn’t mean just talking at him but talking with him. But I do feel a shift toward slightly different meanings of “talk to” and “talk with”–as you point out. But at my age, a “certain age,” for sure, I’m afraid I still talk to people.
Thank you for the very kind words about my book, and for laughing in public. An excellent compliment.