Royal flush on hold

By Michael Graham
    

Dear Better Business Bureau:

I’m writing about a plumber I hired in 2008 to fix my pipes. The name of his business is Barack H. Obama & Co.

Despite many assurances on Mr. Obama’s part, and despite spending far beyond what I wanted on the project, my toilets are still full of . . . well, they’re not fixed. And now I’m told there’s some question as to whether I can fire him.

 

I want to say, right up front, that Mr. Obama inherited a real mess in my house. The plumbing was in worse shape than it had been since, gosh, the late ’70s. Maybe since the 1930s. So I didn’t have any wild expectations that Obama & Co. would have the sinks unclogged and the pipes flowing overnight.

I also want to say that Mr. Obama seemed like a very nice man at the time. I even met his family — beautiful! Sometimes when he talked about his job, it sounded like poetry.

And I won’t deny that, living in a mostly white community, I was pleased to have the chance to hire an African-American to work in my home. But then things started to go, well, wrong.

To start with, I was shocked by the huge price of Mr. Obama’s bid to “stimulate” (he used that word a lot) the plumbing system to get it flowing again. I agreed to spend the money, however, after Obama & Co. guaranteed me that the toilets in the upstairs bathrooms would never overflow.

And you know what, Mr. BBB Man? Well my upstairs toilets have been overflowing for 42 straight months! His repairs still aren’t working!

So I complained to Mr. Obama. He blamed the previous plumber, said the last guy had messed things up so bad that it would take time for his new system to get rid of all the, er, sewage. So I waited.

After a while the toilets seemed to improve somewhat, but they still didn’t work right. But in August 2010, one of his crew, a Mr. Geithner (He handles the books), told me, “It’s fixed!” My plumbing problems were fully recovered. Except . . . the toilets were still flooding.

Soon after that, Mr. Obama’s top assistant, an older gentleman named Biden, announced that “this time they’re really fixed!”

About this Mr. Biden. I’m not sure he’s . . . uh, all there, if you know what I mean?

So I decided that, when my four-year contract with Mr. Obama came to an end this November, I would find a new plumber. I hired him to do a job, he didn’t do it, so he’s fired. That’s what I told him.That’s when Mr. Obama started making me feel . . . uncomfortable.

Mr. Obama’s friends started saying I wanted to fire him because he was black. When I mentioned another plumber, Mr. Mitt’s, to Mr. Obama, I suddenly got emails full of vicious stories about how Mr. Mitt’s had killed the wife of a previous employee. I found a website printout on my desk suggesting Mr. Mitt’s mistreats women customers.

I don’t know what to do. I’m just a homeowner who’s struggling to pay the bills and I need stuff to work. I don’t want to argue about race, or women or what happened in some company 20 years ago — I just want someone to get the [expletive] out of my toilets!

Please respond ASAP. Mr. Obama and his wife are scheduled to stop by this weekend, and every time she comes over, she digs through my fridge and complains about the food I buy. And that’s another thing . . .

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/op_ed/view/20220829royal_flush_on_hold/