‘You get to be the hero.’ Meet the on-call workers who save Thanksgiving.
Like you and me – not to mention countless restaurant managers, airport logistics personnel, and the Dallas Cowboys – Ken Reef doesn’t just show up cold for Thanksgiving Day. He plans for it. He prepares. He pregames.
Unlike you and me, however, Mr. Reef’s preparations don’t involve boning up on recipes or vacuuming the guest bedroom. What Mr. Reef is doing in advance of Thanksgiving is buying water heaters. Lots of them. He knows he’ll need them because he knows we’ll need them – more of us than would like. And Mr. Reef’s job will be to get them into emergency service before our visiting in-laws step into cold showers. Of course, those appliances will be the least of Mr. Reef’s Thanksgiving workload, because Mr. Reef is a plumber. And for plumbers, Thanksgiving is Armageddon.
“Actually, Thanksgiving Day itself starts a little slow,” says Mr. Reef, a 20-year drain-service veteran in Colorado Springs, Colorado, “but by noon things really start kicking off. And the afternoon and evening can be crazy. And then there’s Friday, our busiest day all year. It’s Black Friday to you. To us? Make that ‘Brown Friday.’ Sorry. But there are disasters.”
Such as?
“Well, you know the famous one about the turkey in the trap?”
Not that kind of trap. Turns out he’s referring to “a case out of Kansas City,” which has become lore in the plumbing trade. Evidently a local firm was called to the home of an older woman because her toilet had jammed, and now there was the worst kind of flood. Not a problem, said the plumber in question, nothing we can’t handle.
But the typical handling didn’t work. The plungers, the mechanical snakes. The plumber deduced
On callHoliday hotlineDodging disaster“You get to be the hero”