This thread's comments bring back a rather funny fire call we had here about 5-6 years back.
A plumber and his apprentice were working in the crawl space of a house not that far from here actually, the plumber fed a length of PVC sewer line into the crawl space, via a vent in the concrete foundations of the house, which the apprentice them primed, glued and asked the plumber to push the pipe into the other end of the elbow they had previously installed.
It was about this time that the apprentice realised he was trapped between the bottom of the pipe and the ground under him, with the pipe touching the underside of the floor joists he couldn't move an inch either way.
The plumber was not willing to cut the pipe (an 8" sewer line), he rang the Fire Brigade, the guy might have wished he had just cut the pipe, as there is a couple of electricians in the brigade here.
I'll never forget what the officer in charge (an electrician) said when he looked under the floor to see an apprentice who was obviously in tears.
"Hmm, what are the means of this?"
He yelled out to us, who were near the manhole (in front of the plumber, of course).
"What is the current hourly rate for the hire of a shovel and for someone to use it?"
I said "$172 +GST, I believe"
Plumber said "I'm NOT paying that!"
The OIC said "Well we could do you a really good saw for $45/hour +GST, it's nice, we've just painted it, it's pretty"
Long story short, we dug the young fella out, much to his relief, one of our guys banged his head getting out of the man-hole, trying to avoid, you guessed it, another plumbers drain line.
BTW, no money did change hands.
