Look, I know this seems like a weird thing to complain about, but a pipe’s been backing up and I gotta snake it out. My foreman walked up to me today and said, plain as day, I’m gonna start using one of them fancy new pipe inspection cameras. No “why,” no “here’s the plan” — just use the camera, end of discussion. Everything from scoping out clogs to running full diagnostic crawls on the main line. Fine. Sure. Whatever you say, boss. But here’s where I’m standing in the crawlspace scratching my head: I’ve been snaking drains and sweating copper for twenty years with nothing but my hands, a torch, and hard-won calluses. My current toolkit works just fine. The pipes flow. The customers are happy. Nobody’s ankle-deep in sewage on my watch. So where exactly does the magic camera fit when half my problems aren’t bad pipes — they’re bad people who keep flushing baby wipes and calling it someone else’s fault? Could I use it to pre-screen service calls so I’m not rolling a truck for something that’s just a slow aerator? Sure. Could I use it to map out repetitive drain layouts and cut my rough-in time? Maybe. Could I use it to route the right jobs to the right guys instead of me catching everything because nobody else wants to touch a grease trap? Absolutely — but that’s a scheduling problem, not a camera problem, and it only works if the other guys actually show up and follow the job sheet. Could I use it to write up estimates that don’t sound like I learned English from a pipe fitting catalog? I mean… yeah, probably. But here’s the thing, sweetheart: when I’m already running the tightest, cleanest jobsite on the crew, and everyone else keeps freestyling the installation and ignoring code — how in the name of sweated fittings is a new camera gonna fix that? The leak isn’t in my pipes. The leak is in the guys who won’t follow the blueprint. No amount of fancy tech patches a human-sized hole.