Hunterdon is the western edge of the service area, and it is built around distance.
Flemington sits at the center, Clinton and High Bridge are up 31, and Lambertville,
Frenchtown and Milford are strung along the Delaware on River Road. Route 78 carries
the county to work in the morning. Everything else is Readington, Tewksbury, Delaware,
Alexandria and Holland: township roads with a mailbox at the end of a private drive
and a house you cannot see from the pavement. The phone rings while the truck is
halfway down one of them.
The customer here has usually already called somebody. Three names off a search,
three voicemails, and nobody called back. By the fourth call the expectation is set,
and it is low. A shop that picks up on the second ring, takes the address and books a
time has already done the thing the last three did not. Not a lower price, not a newer
truck. A phone that answered, and a callback that came.
The work has a shape out here. Wells and septic nearly everywhere, so a plumber’s
week has pressure tanks and well pumps in it. Propane and oil, because the gas main
does not run down many of the township roads. Barns, run-in sheds and outbuildings that need
heat, water and power like a second house. Horse farms and estates in Tewksbury and
out toward the Bedminster line, old stone houses along the river that a remodeler
treats nothing like a Readington development, and standby generators, because when
the lines come down the well pump goes with them and the house is dry until the
power is back. Round Valley and Spruce Run sit in the middle of all of it.
The agent runs on a phone line, so distance changes nothing about how it answers.
What it changes is the calendar. A job in Frenchtown and a job in Califon are not the
same afternoon, and an agent written for a Hunterdon shop knows that, because the
shop told it. It books only the openings the truck can reach, and it leaves the drive
time to the person who has made the drive.
