"I'm very glad I stuck with this career because it paid off," he says. Ultimately, Armendariz says he's grateful for the professional path that he has taken. "And then I was asking him 'What do you do?' He said, 'Well, I'm the groundskeeper here.'" "I was looking around and I said 'Man, you've done really well,'" says Armendariz. "Several years later, he called me out for a service call."Īrmendariz showed up to a massive property with multiple cars filling a wrap-around driveway. "This young man had told me that I wasn't gonna amount to anything doing plumbing because he was going to college and he had these big visions of what he was going to do with his degrees," he says. The worst job Armendariz says he has ever been on involved six inches of sewage in an apartment complex, but his most memorable job started with a service request from one of his high school classmates. "I felt bad because I had no water so I couldn't take a shower." I was running service calls to help other people get water and I had none," says Armendariz. "We were out of water for about six or seven consecutive days. His own family had no water for days on end. I have a broken pipe, the house is flooding.' So we were trying to help people cut their water off," he says. We were getting between 250 to 500 calls a day of people calling in saying, 'Hey, my water lines are frozen. "When it started to freeze, everybody lost water. In the cold temperatures, many Texans had pipes burst.Īrmendariz worked for two weeks straight. Nearly 70% of Texans lost electrical power, and nearly 50% lost access to running water. 2021, when a winter storm caused major power outages - and plumbing emergencies - across the state of Texas. But for them, this is the end of the world as they know it." So for me, my work environment doesn't change. "It's very important that we have some kind of empathy for them because for us as plumbers, we see it every day. I would say that's probably good 60% to 70% of our work," he says. "A big part of our job is just consoling the customer. While technical plumbing skills are a key part of his job, Armendariz says the rest of his time is spent comforting customers. "I don't think customers really know that. Some days, we don't get lunch, sometimes we eat on the drive from one job to the other," says Armendariz. Often, his schedule is hectic, leaving little time for meals. So we try our hardest to give them some kind of service before we can take a break." "Sometimes if you get stuck on a job, let's say you're on a job where a customer has no water, you can't really leave them without water. We'll leave our house about 7:30 and we get to their first job between eight or nine in the morning," he says. ![]() "We're dispatched from our house and they usually have the first customer ready for us by about 7:30. Armendariz works Monday through Friday and says no two days are exactly the same.
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