My Dad Finished Repairing My Boss’s Pool and Was Refused Payment, Then One Look at the Water Told Him Exactly What to Do

My father has been fixing pools for twenty-nine years.

He started when he was thirty-two and he is now sixty-one and in that time he has worked on pools ranging from simple vinyl-lined residential installations to the complex gunite constructions of high-end properties, and he has developed, over those decades, the specific knowledge base of someone who has spent an enormous amount of time looking at the same thing from every angle.

He can tell you what a pool did ten years ago by looking at it now.

He can read the chemistry of water the way other people read weather, by instinct and pattern recognition that has become so automatic it does not feel like analysis anymore.

He can look at a pump and know, within minutes, the sequence of problems that produced its current failure, which is different from the sequence of problems that look similar, which is different from the sequence that a less experienced technician would diagnose incorrectly.