I generally think the plumbing analogy is a pretty good one. It even works for estimates! We're often asked the equivalent of "how long will it take you to ho

I generally think the plumbing analogy is a pretty good one. It even works for estimates! We're often asked the equivalent of "how long will it take you to hook my sink up to my toothbrush for my Thursday home parties" and... well it's nothing new. It's just pipes. Anyone can do it. But estimating it requires an absurd amount of context which is not always available. How far apart are those two things? Is there enough water flow to power the toothbrush, or will you need to upgrade the piping to the sink too? Sometimes the house has everything made of marble and it'll cost millions of dollars to replace the holes you need to make to put those pipes in, though piping itself is only like 30 minutes. Sometimes the toothbrush is a legacy model that only works with deionized water from Uruguay that has been flown within 50 meters of the south pole in the middle of March, do they have a reservoir available for that or can you convince them to just buy a modern one from Walmart to replace it? Does a DWUSPM50 water supplier even exist any more? Oh, you meant only during those Thursday parties? Is there a way we can tell when those are happening, or can they just pull on a lever to change the system? Does GPRD require the pipes to physically separated by 1m when turned off, or is a valve good enough? Why in the world does the customer require all horizontal pipe runs to only go North unless they're underground? None of which is hard, and the plumber doesn't have to build it all in many cases. But how long is it going to take? .... somewhere between an hour and the end of the universe, most likely, unless there's proof the request is impossible. It's not a perfect, beautiful snowflake, but it is a snowflake.