The Geyser Job I Could Not Start Without Buying the Parts First

The trade my father warned me away from

I am a plumber in Boksburg, on the East Rand, and I have been one for nineteen years, which is long enough to know that the hardest pipe to unblock is the one between the work you have done and the money you are owed for it. My father was a plumber too, and he spent my whole childhood telling me not to go into it, not because the work is bad, the work is honest and I love it, but because of exactly the thing that nearly undid me last year. You do the job, you do it well, and then you wait. The invoice goes out and it sits, and the client is a good person who fully intends to pay you, just not this week, and meanwhile the whole machine of your little business runs on cash you do not have yet.

For most of my career I managed it the way my father did, by keeping a buffer, a bit put aside so that the gap between doing work and being paid for it did not swallow me. But the last couple of years have been hard on everyone, and my buffer had quietly disappeared into a new work bakkie, a dentist, a daughter who started high school with all the costs that come with that. I was not in trouble. I was just thin. And thin is a dangerous way to be when a big opportunity arrives, because a big opportunity usually needs money up front before it pays you anything at all.

The job that was too good to turn down

The opportunity came from a managing agent I had done small jobs for over the years. A block of flats, an old one, had a geyser situation that had gone from a nuisance to an emergency, and they wanted the lot replaced, eleven units, properly, quickly, before the whole building had cold water and angry tenants. For me, a one-man operation with occasional help from my brother-in-law, this was the biggest single job anyone had ever offered me. The kind of job you tell your wife about in a certain quiet voice because you do not want to jinx it.

Here was the trap. Eleven geysers, plus all the valves and brackets and piping and the rest of it, is a serious amount of stock, and the supplier who gives me a decent price does not do it on an account for someone my size. It is cash on collection, or near enough. The managing agent would pay me, in full and probably on time, but only after the work was signed off, which was two to three weeks away. So there I was, holding the best job of my life in one hand, and in the other hand not nearly enough money to buy the parts to even start it. And every day I delayed, there was a real risk they would simply give it to a bigger outfit who could.

I did the sums at the kitchen table more times than was good for me. The job would pay well. The parts were the whole obstacle. I needed a bridge across three weeks, and I needed it fast, and I needed it without losing the one thing I actually owned outright, which was parked in the driveway.

The thing I owned, and the thing I did not want to lose

The bakkie was mine. Fully paid off, the previous year, a moment I had celebrated with a steak and a quiet sense of having finally got somewhere. It is also, and this is the part that made the whole thing so knotted, the single most important tool in my business. A plumber without a vehicle is a man with a bag of spanners and nowhere to take them. I could not sell it. I could not have it sitting in some yard while I waited. I needed the money and the bakkie at the same time, which sounds like wanting to eat your bread and still have it, and I assumed it was just as impossible.

I had always been nervous of borrowing. My father's warnings again, I suppose. The loan sharks in our area are not subtle, and the stories about people who get in over their heads are not stories, they are neighbours. So when my brother-in-law mentioned, carefully, because he knew how I felt about it, that there was a legitimate way to get loans against your car without actually handing the car over and losing the use of it, I was sceptical in the way you are sceptical of anything that sounds like it solves a problem that is not supposed to be solvable.

But I looked into it properly, the way I would check a fitting before I trusted it to hold pressure. The idea, as I understood it, was that you could essentially pawn car and still drive it, which meant the vehicle secured the money but stayed in my driveway and on my jobs where it belonged. For a man whose livelihood lives in the back of that bakkie, that distinction was not a small detail. It was the entire thing.

Doing it with my eyes open

I want to be clear that I did not rush in. I have watched too many people sign things they did not read, and I was not going to be one of them. I worked out exactly how much I needed for the parts, not a rand more, because the mistake people make is borrowing for the want instead of the need. I understood what it would cost me, and I measured that against what the job would pay, and the maths was not even close. The cost of the bridge was a small fraction of what the geyser job would bring in. It was, in plain terms, the cheapest way to turn the biggest job of my life from a maybe into a yes.

So I did it. I used the bakkie to get a short-term amount to pawn car for cash, bought the eleven geysers and all the fittings that same afternoon, and I was up a ladder in that old block of flats the very next morning with my brother-in-law passing me tools and the building manager looking relieved for the first time in weeks. The bakkie was right there in the parking area, loaded with stock, doing exactly what it was built to do. Nobody took it anywhere. Nobody held it hostage. It secured the money and it stayed mine to use, and that was the whole clever heart of the arrangement.

Three weeks, and then the bridge was gone

The job took a little longer than I hoped, as they always do, because an old building keeps its surprises behind the walls. But it got done, and it got done properly, and the managing agent signed it off and paid me in full, and the first thing I did with that payment, before anything else, before even telling my wife the exact figure, was settle the short-term amount I had taken against the bakkie. The bridge had done its work and I did not want to stand on it a day longer than I needed to. That is the part my father, if he were still here, would have respected. You borrow for a reason, you use it for that reason, and you close it the moment the reason is paid for.

What I came away with was not just the profit from eleven geysers, good as that was. It was a different understanding of the gap that had frightened me my whole career, the gap between doing the work and being paid. For nineteen years I had treated that gap as a wall. Now I know it is a thing you can bridge, carefully, with your eyes open, using something you already own, without giving up the use of it. My daughter is in her last years of school now and the costs keep coming, and the buffer is slowly rebuilding. But I sleep differently knowing that if the biggest job of my life comes along again tomorrow, the lack of a few weeks' cash is no longer a reason to watch it drive off to somebody else.