May as well suck on a penny while drinking that lemonade

I had a guy come into the store last night and putz around in plumbing for twenty minutes so I wandered over to see if he needed some help. It's a good thing I did.
He'd replaced the saddle valve for his refrigerator ice maker with a threaded T sweated onto the copper line. In order to connect the plastic tubing he picked up a 1/4" compression by 3/8" MIP brass fitting and a 1/2" to 3/8" galvanized steel bushing. Fortunately I was able to stop him and find some brass fittings to make his connection.

For those playing along at home the reason you don't want galvanized and copper touching is that they will corrode each other. If you have to have both in the same line make sure to use a dielectric union so that the metals are isolated.

This Old House Inspection Nightmares X

I've heard the story about the home-made bidet for years, but this is the first picture I've ever seen of it.

Home Inspection Nightmares X, from This Old House

A brief explanation and introduction

All posts prior to this were originally published in my personal journal. Every so often I'd share the more amazing stories from work with my friends. However, my company's new anti-blogging policy has forced me to move them to a more anonymous venue.

My purpose here is not to ridicule the behavior of consumers - there are plenty of places to read about unreasonable customers. Instead, I want to share stories of people who have just enough knowledge to be scary.

Explosion one

A couple of weeks ago this guy came into the store looking to buy a flexible gas line.

Me: How far is your dryer from the gas line?
Him: Thirty feet.
Me: So you want some pipe and fittings then?
Him: No, just give me five of those flexible lines.
Me: Pipe would be easier, cheaper, and safer in the long run.
Him: Nah, I'd have to run it against the wall and I can't really attach it to anything.
Me: Here's the pipe, there's the flexible line. I'll show you the parts you need for laying the pipe but I won't show you how to hook five flexible lines together.

What I want to know is where this idiot got the idea to hook the flexible lines together. I got the feeling from him that there was a "knowledgeable father-in-law" waiting back at the house to help him.

Maybe if I use more glue

No matter how much PVC cement you use you cannot get ABS to bond to CPVC. When I told this to a customer he said he'd done it last week on his neighbor's hot water tank and it was working fine.

Snake? What snake?

A few months back I had a guy come in looking for a way to clean out his kitchen drain. He said that all the standard chemicals didn't help and that when he removed the P-trap and stuck the cable into the PVC pipe in the wall it only went a few inches before getting stuck.
It was a slow night so I spent some time with this guy trying to figure out another approach. If he came in today I'd point him at the Clog Buster and send him on his way, but the store didn't carry it at the time so we came up with a complicated series of couplings and adapters to connect his garden hose directly into the drainpipe.
We finally got everything together and as I tossed it all into a basket for him we had this exchange:

Me: So, when you stuck the snake down the drain how far did it go before it got stuck?
Him: Snake?
Me: (taking the basket and dumping it onto the shelf) Follow me.

Turns out he hadn't used an auger of any kind - instead, he had unbent a wire coat-hanger and shoved it into the drainpipe.