The plumbers of France rebelled against the elites, or so the headlines would have us believe. Here’s an edited email from one of my readers regarding living in France with plumbers, who by the way are all members of a national plumbers union.

“So we had the plans and called a local plumber with a three generation resume' of plumbing expertise,” begins this story from an American who lived in France for three years while the woman completed university there.

“So the guy shows up a week late, lays stuff all over the house, and the two of them started to work. A project that should have taken two days took two and a half weeks. That’s because they were lazy, slow, and didn’t show up for work most days.

“When they finally finished it turned out they did the job wrong, used inferior materials, and refused to fix it, claiming the job had been done correctly. So we hired another plumber to fix the bad job. Except when replacement plumbers discovered that they were to fix a bad job done by one of their fellow union members, they all refused."

It gets better. "Me and my husband decided to just do the dam job ourselves. I went to a library and got a book on how to do the job, my husband bought the tools and some pipe and after three days of tearing out all the plumbers work and just one day to install the job correctly, we were told we had to have the job inspected.

The inspector(s) came out and shook their heads, kicked at the floor, and refused to approve our work. We were supposed to call in the original plumber or else they would cite us, which means in France that you do not have use of your own property.”

They sold their house two months later—another horror story—she graduated, and they came back to the states.