All in a Day's Work

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The first thing you need to know about this job is that you haven't got a clue when you leave home in the morning what you're going to be doing when you get to work. You might think you know, but you never do. We get work tickets coming in all the time telling us what to do - things like "two blocked urinals, please investigate and rectify". But we can be working on a job like that, fairly important, and then the phone rings about something urgent and you have to drop everything and run. You can't leave something for long when there's water gushing out of somewhere.

So obviously we do lots of work with blocked drains, blocked toilets, blocked urinals. And we fit a lot of taps. You can imagine how many taps there are in the University, when you include all the accommodation as well, especially the off-campus accommodation. Holland House is one of the worst - it's like a rabbit warren, there are hundreds of rooms in there alone, and each one has water, sinks and wastes. Some of the hair I've pulled out of plug-holes there....well, I won't tell you about that.

Someone's on call 24 hours a day, and two of us take it in turns to do that. There are seven plumbers on the team now, although there used to be 15. Sometimes when you're on call you can get called out a lot. Last week I got called out six times. The other Saturday morning there was water coming out of a ceiling in lab 13. And later that day one of the accommodation properties had a blocked drain and the water was coming down and flooding the kitchen. For that job I had to call someone out to assist me - you can't go down a drain on your own. If you go in above your own height, the gases and that can make you pass out, and you need someone to help you out. You need to wear a harness as well. A job like that can be quite dangerous.

In fact, all the plumbers have to know how to deal with gases. Drains and toilets are only part of our job. We've all got a CORGI certificate, because we have to deal with different kinds of gases all the time. In the labs there's nitrogen, oxygen, helium...and they all have to be worked on. If there's a gas leak, we repair it. If they want a gas point over the other side of the room and there's no gas there, we install it. The range of what we do is huge. If there's any equipment that's broken at the Sports Centre, we'll take it down to be welded and fixed. All the bike racks that you see around campus, they've not been bought, they've been built - by the plumbers. We've bent them up, welded them up and painted them right here, then fitted them ourselves. There's all the air-conditioning and the ventilation to fix too. We also fix all the windows - if a hinge or the catch goes, we fix that. And when the roof-tops blew off in the 1987 storm, it was the plumbers who fixed them.

People don't realise, they think a plumber is an insignificant part of the procedure, but we do keep the University going. The campus is so colossal, there's so many things that can go wrong, and when it goes wrong, we are there to put it right.