Well, shower actually. But the rhyme was just too good to pass up.
Last week, I woke up for my morning shower only to find a shower from the previous morning still standing there. Having a house built in the early 1900s, I really wasn’t surprised. Having a wallet that resembled the early 1930s, I had to figure out how to do it myself. Having a meeting in 30 minutes, I bit the bullet and did some early season wading.
The first attempted fix would come later that evening after I made a trip to the hardware store to pick up a drain snake and some chemicals. The liquid un-clogger worked – but not convincingly. I knew there was something that lurked beneath. More than likely remnants of yellow labrador retriever hair and human hair all matted into a nice little sewer puck.
Enter the plumbing snake and low-rise trousers. Time to get to work…for about thirty seconds until I got my snake all tangled up and stuck in the drain. Not kind of stuck. Not sort of stuck. Stuck, stuck. Stuck like put-two-feet-on-the-wall-and-pull-horizontal stuck. The serious kind of stuck. And, well, pardon the toilet humor, stuck and sh*t out of luck. While I wouldn’t be showering with three inches of fermenting water today, I would be showering with a plumbing snake until I could figure out how in the hell to unclog it.
And that’s exactly when it hit me. That St. Louis plumber I’d seen tweeting on Twitter. Maybe he could help…
So I gave it a shot:
Within 10 minutes – TEN MINUTES – I got a response (two actually, plus a retweet) from the man himself:
This was really cool. A guy who could have easily tried to charge me for his expertise, instead, decided to opt to capitalize on one of the biggest business benefits of Twitter, that of two-way communication that engages a potential customer, and try to help me out. A method of lead nurturing if you will.
My response was as follows:
That night, I got home and gave the ol’ plumbing snake the counter-clockwise spin. It worked. In about ten seconds of time, my shower was back to normal.
So, while Mr. LaMartina may have missed out on the business this time around, he’s got it the next time the water rises. I promise that. Congrats to guys like Tony LaMartina for being forward thinking and using tech to cost efficiently and effectively market their small businesses.
Thanks for reading.
