Finding a Plumber in France, and All the 🚩 I Ignored

Hint: Don't choose the cute one.

Back in February, I needed a plombier. I was in a temporary apartment, and the lid of the toilet tank was unattached; to flush, you had to manually press the yellow button because the green button didn’t work. There was also a leak in the bathroom sink. (The bathtub and bathroom sink are in another area of the apartment, apart from the toilet, which is in a little closet beside the kitchen.) The previous tenant had left everything like this, and the landlord lives in Brittany.

The toilet when I arrived.

I did some Googling and filled out the contact forms for a few plumbing companies, writing in French that I’m an American who doesn’t speak much English, and my toilet needs a new flusher. I always avoid calling, because I’m anxious about phone calls in French. How would I even explain the problem?

Late that night — like 10pm (🚩 #1) — my friend Julia and I were having a cocktail at my place when my phone rang, and for some reason I answered it. The guy on the other end was a plumber who spoke English! He said he’d lived in Davis (of all places) for two years, he knew my hometown of Santa Maria, and he could come look at my toilet the next evening. Hooray! Let’s say his name was Omar.

The next day, two men showed up: Omar, who was in his early 30s, quite handsome and smiley, and his younger assistant, who didn’t speak much. Omar sat in my kitchen while his assistant (who he said was in training) worked on the toilet. He asked me if I lived there alone: Yes. If I was single: Yes. I said something about him being married because he had a chunky silver ring on his left ring finger, and he said, “No, this is a ring my mother gave me before she died, I wear it to remember her.” And I laughed because it seemed like such an obvious lie. But then he went silent and sullen, ignoring me for a while, which made me feel terrible for offending him by laughing! At the death of his mother!

I paid Omar €400 cash to fix the toilet and the leak. (Luckily, the landlord reimbursed me.) I also wrote a glowing review on Google about how great he was and how all English-speaking expats in France should hire him.

Omar’s trainee installing a new flusher.

The list of services from the facture (invoice), no doubt overpriced.

Now the toilet flushed well and the bathroom pipes weren’t leaking — but water was trickling constantly from beneath the rim of the toilet seat into the bowl. Google told me this was an easy-to-fix problem, so I texted Omar to see if he could return soon (along with a video). He came back, and on this visit he discovered that the toilet was in fact not glued to the floor. It was just resting on top of the hole! He felt bad that his trainee didn’t notice this problem; had he fixed the toilet in the first place, he would have seen it. So he would come back again with glue and fix the toilet for good. And I didn’t have to pay him. But I could make him dinner (🚩 #2).

Note the shiny new flusher.

I’m totally embarrassed to say that at this point, he felt like a friend, and yes there was a bit of flirtation going on, and so yes I did make a spinach quiche and he did come over a third time, late in the evening (🚩 #4), to glue the toilet to the ground. After we ate, my cell phone rang. Twice. From the same number.

On the second ring, I answered, and a young woman’s voice said: “Le plombier? Il est avec toi? C’est mon mari.”

The plumber was married, and his wife was calling my phone.

I said he had just left, having fixed the toilet. I hung up the phone and asked Omar to please leave, handing him a €20 — in the moment, I wanted to ensure I paid him with something other than quiche, as if to erase the ickiness of the situation. He insisted he was not married, that the woman who called was his “secretary” who he “had slept with” and was now “crazy.” I said I would ask this “crazy secretary” for proof that they were married and he said angrily, “Yeah, you do that, and you’ll be really embarrassed when you find out I’m telling the truth!”

After he left, I texted with the woman who had called. She sent me photos of their wedding day, said she was 7 months pregnant, and I assured her that nothing happened. (I was never really interested; I mostly wanted someone who could fix the plumbing for cheap, which is the exact opposite of what I got.)

But what I didn’t say to her was that this man is a liar — not to mention a bad plumber.

Because the next day, water was leaking on the floor with each flush. Clearly, I was not going to call Omar again. I deleted my Google review.

(I also discovered, when cleaning the toilet, that Omar had rolled up toilet paper and shoved it under the rim of the seat to lessen the trickle. Each time I cleaned with the toilet brush, a little more toilet paper dislodged. Unbelievable!)

Water leaking from the back of the tank.

At this point, I was dating a composer. He offered to look at the leak, and he spent one Saturday morning fixing it, with multiple trips to a hardware store. A hero! Our romance was short lived, but that was unexpectedly kind of him. A pianist. Fixing the toilet. Who would’ve guessed? No red flags here (except for the fact that I was often exasperated and crying when I was with him (🚩).

But the water was still running into the bowl, with this constant, annoyingly loud trickle. I would turn the water valve off except for when I flushed. I worried about the cost for my landlord.

Meanwhile, it was May, and I made the decision to move. The apartment I was moving into in June was being painted by an older man, maybe in his 70s, who only spoke French. I had to let him into the apartment and then get the keys back from him a week later, so we had a few conversations, on the phone and in person, entirely in French. (I’m getting a bit better!) I asked if he could also do some plumbing, showed him a video of the trickle, and he said he could come the next day for what would be a very easy fix. He arrived, and fixed it within a few minutes, for €30 (he only wanted €20 but I insisted). This little, elderly man with whom I only spoke French fixed the problem that had been plaguing me since February. Merci, Monsieur Nasser.

The toilet was finally working perfectly, glued to the floor, silent.

I moved the next day.

Au revoir to this strange kitchen-WC arrangement.

What lessons have we learned? Maybe don’t go for the first young, handsome, English-speaking person who offers their services. Maybe get a few quotes instead. Everyone is nice — no one is really that bad in this story — but people have their own agendas. Listen to the red flags 🚩 (a.k.a. “gut feeling,” a.k.a. intuition).

And now it’s summer in Paris, the sun stays up ’til 10pm, and I have the phone number of a sweet elderly gentleman who I hope will now be able to fix the jangly kitchen faucet.