A receptionist that gets the water off before it asks for the address.

A dispatcher who has done this for years says the same things in the same order: slow the water down, tell me where you are, here is what it costs for us to come, here is when. At two in the afternoon your office does that well. At two in the morning the line forwards to a cell phone on a nightstand, or to an answering service that reads a card and promises a callback. The caller with water coming through the ceiling does not wait for the callback.

The calls sort into kinds, and each kind has a different right answer. Active water from a burst line or a heater gets the shutoff coaching and the on-call page. Sewage in a floor drain gets a warning to stop running water and the page. No hot water at ten at night usually waits for the morning unless there is a leak with it. One slow drain waits; every drain backing up at once is a main line and does not. A frozen pipe gets the thawing cautions you approve and nothing about open flames. A smell of gas near a water heater gets one instruction: leave, and call the utility from outside.

Then there are the days the whole town calls at once: the hard freeze, the day after Thanksgiving when every kitchen drain in the county gives up, the first spring storm that finds every tired sump pump. Those are the days a two-person office cannot answer, and the days that decide which plumber the neighborhood remembers.