02/24/2025
HOW TO ENGAGE THE SERVICES OF A POOL GUY OR POOL GAL.
-Call the pool company after lunch on Friday or before a holiday weekend.
- Hassle them to fit you in.
- Estimate the time and ease of the job. They like that. Explain that it is a five minute job that you could do yourself if “only you had the time.”
- Negotiate the smallest, most inconvenient window of booking opportunity. "I have to go to the gym" or some other more important engagement than your non-functioning pool. This will smooth things over.
- Ask for a fixed price for the diagnosis and repair, even if your equipment isn't moving any water and you don't know if it's because of the filter, the pump, a broken pipe, or any of a dozen other possible causes. When the pool company refuses to be nailed down, some jovial comment like “I should have been a pool guy!”will keep the negotiation nice and light.
- Tell him that you will run it by your wife and call back in five.
- Call ten other pool companies and then phone back. If he answers the phone again, and arrives to do the job, be sure to be in the shower or on the way home at the time.
- Show him the job, which does not even vaguely resemble what you described.
- Ask him to move his truck. Someone needs to get their car out and it clearly can't wait five minutes.
- Show him where the problem is. Explain how you can't find the key to the side gate and he will have to lug his equipment around the long way.
- Now is probably a good time to point out that the problem first appeared on a Monday 3 weeks ago.
- Embark on a long-winded story involving names of people he does not know and could not give a darn about, and every completely unrelated event leading up to this moment in time.
- Share your half cocked theory on what is going on. (“Air in the pipes” perhaps?) Explain what you read on the internet and give him all the details from that YouTube video you watched.
- Apologize for the 20 years of w**d growth around your equipment where he will be working. Explain how it is someone else’s fault. This will make it more palatable.
- Tell him one of your close relatives was a pool guy. (He will be extremely interested in this and it will create a sense of kinship between you.)
- Explain that you would be quite capable of doing the job and that you have done heaps of plumbing in the past. (He will love to hear that his knowledge, skills and necessary equipment amount to being a glorified handyman.)
- Tell the pool guy that you normally use a different pool company but they were not answering their phone.
- Wait until he is nearly finished and ask him if he has time to embark on the dreaded Friday afternoon “marathon”. There are no sweeter words on a Friday afternoon at 3 pm than, “While I've got you here...”
- Make sure to have some form of terrifying, thorn-filled, overgrown plant keeping guard over the only access to the pool equipment.
- Watch the pool guy closely. The pool skills you gleaned from your family member will place you well to critique his every action.
- Pull out some parts you picked up at Leslies 10 years ago. (No sense wasting them, huh?)
- Keep locking the screen door. It may be a minor inconvenience for the pool guy to keep having to ask you to unlock it whenever he needs to go to his truck, but home invasions are on the rise.
- Grill the pool guy over why he has to leave to pick up some part for your Chinese imported filter that you “got a great deal on”.
- Complain about the invoice and whine to all your friends about the pool company's price and unpleasant attitude.
- Call a week later and say, “Ever since your guy was here, the pump sounds different...”
