Plumbers can mend a pipe’s rusty part between floors to hopefully eliminate a wet spot in a flat downstairs, but can create a spurt of scorching leakage if they do not weld the patch well upstairs.

This is the recent past of my downstairs neighbour, and this is the unknown future prepared for me by the drops of water trickling down from the welding.

Specialized labour has one advantage over all-in-one service, and specialized service dominates the efficiency of specialized labour.

No one can make a neighbour understand that wetness is not always the result of a hole near the central heating pipes, but any neighbour can see the hole created by the repairs which is large enough for direct communication and exchange of small articles.

No one can make a person intent on immediate actions that the Saturday before Easter is the worst time for wet spots to be eliminated, though everybody will shrink into indifference when the welded place spurts out scorch when the hot water comes in winter.

Nobody can convince a neighbour that the worst time to scare a block of flats that they will have no water supply for a whole day, though everybody will understand that cold water has nothing to do with the central heating.

No one will believe a couple of neighbours filing round their different stories, though everybody will take the side of the one whose version is more logically unegoistic.

Specialized service will not look for a cause but will jump at mending the effect, creating a new cause, but paid and gone into obscurity, having done a hurried job very slowly.

No observer will fail to notice that if a pipe patch is about four centimeters shorter than to fit, a welding will not be enough, and if a pipe is a few centimeters longer, the hammering in will create a crack elsewhere.

Big Politics that created for many the necessity to find any job, and the need to find any source of income, is a match to the Theory of Exchange. And if one says that it was the blue banners welcoming democracy in Bulgaria are to be blamed for the downfall of the socialist model, one must have another look and see who were under the banners and who swiftly developed the capitalist sense for money. It may turn out that it was the socialists that turned capitalistic.

The hole that my neighbour believed I had in my flat is now a reality between us, and the leakage that she was told by specialized service to be coming from between the floors is now a trickle down the mended pipe. My neighbour seems to have projected the future into the present.

No one but my neighbour’s lodger who forgot to put away a couple of bottles of detergent will believe that welding in a flat may cause with its fireworks a fire. Of course, the more determined plumber was ready to pay with part of my money for the bottles, following the rules of the Theory of Exchange.

No one will believe that the three men working on a problem like ours can also have their families and are also cold in the corridors and the tiny bathrooms, but can I or my neighbour give them a meal if we have cooked none, and are clutching the money with which to pay them.

No neighbour will stand the noise of cutting, breaking, and welding, even the neighbours whose dog bumps at my door at about two o’clock each night, and every neighbour will believe that Holy Saturday was selected by my neighbour and me for the repairs, and not by the full-scheduled workers.

In one word, everybody is happy and ready to welcome East orthodox Easter tomorrow, especially Big politics and my Theory of Exchange.
And if the hole is filled but a spurt happens, the rumour of my flooding my neighbour will become reality and she will have had it all, her rumors, her hole, and a leakage, but where am I in it all with my conviction that the sorry-looking pipes were not the cause but the effect of an operation carried out without a preliminary diagnosis of all unhealthy suspects.
V.P.Toucheva 26.04.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria