How Plumbing Connects Everything

I recently turned 56, and with the passing of years I’ve become set in my ways and a bit of a homebody. Which means I rarely meet new people (outside of work). But when I do inevitably the question comes up, “So, what do you do for a living?” and I say I write and edit for a plumbing magazine, and that I’ve been doing it for about 30 years.

At which the eyebrows go up, and they usually ask something along the lines of, “How do you come up with new things to write about?”

And sometimes I’ll just smile and mumble something vague and let the conversation move on to other things… but other times I’ll start talking about the latest stories I’ve been working on—and talking, and talking—until either their eyes glaze over or my wife shows up to rescue them. Plumbing is a topic, I learned long ago, that can never be exhausted. It intersects our lives and our communities in numberless ways.

The typical division in this magazine has been between the technical side and the business side. So, helping our readers do better or different types of work, and then helping them become more successful at selling their services while at the same time developing their companies or careers.

This month, a prime example on the technical side is our hydronic case study, where Editor-at-Large John Mesenbrink talks to Foley Mechanical about a boiler changeout job involving a hydronic air handler.

On the business side, the PHCC Educational Foundation’s Dan Quinonez has a guest article for us on soft skills; not just the new education offerings from the foundation, but how teaching and championing those skills can make a difference both in your business and in how the public perceives the trades.

Dan’s article reminds me how much this industry is really about the people in it. While the typical person only thinks about plumbing when the drain is clogged or the faucet is dripping, plumbing is a livelihood for tens of thousands of people across this nation—and critical to the health of billions around the world.  

That human factor is something we work hard to emphasize here at CONTRACTOR. It’s one of the reasons we run so many interviews in a question-and-answer format. Nowadays, when AIs can generate pages of copy in seconds, authentic human voices are more valuable, more needed than ever before.

We have two Q&As this month, the first with the incoming president of the MCAA. Curtis Harbour talks at length about the initiatives he hopes to promote during his presidency, and prime among them is mentorship; he gives credit to the mentors who helped shape his life and career, and sees the true value in that person-to-person transmission of knowledge, experience and values.

The other is with Chris Drew, CEO of Burnham Holdings. As you might imagine from someone leading a major water heater manufacturer, his concerns are global—world-spanning supply chains, Federal legislation—but they are ultimately human: serving customers through products that are high quality, high efficiency, and above all safe.

Plumbing has become, for me, a window onto the wider world. It encompasses science, business, politics, art (the feature this month is about the latest remodeling design trends) and so much more. But it all comes back to people and their stories. Which means, luckily, I’m never going to run out of stories to tell.