Plumber Huang Weiguo and one of his toolboxes (Jiang XIaowei/SHINE)
Huang Weiguo, 58, has what he describes as a somewhat humdrum job that entails carrying a 20-kilogram bag to work every day. But if your apartment lights go out or your kitchen faucet springs a leak, he's a godsend at the doorstep.
Huang is an electrician and plumber who works for the Housing Maintenance Co of the Shanghai West Enterprise Group, a state-owned real estate developer and property management firm.
"All I ever do is repeating a simple job day after day, but I enjoy helping people resolve problems," he says.
It is that dedication to his work that won Huang distinction as a "Shanghai Standout" — an honor conferred on those deemed to make worthy contributions to the city's progress.
About 40 years ago, Huang was recruited from his native Chongming Island, along with dozens of fellow townsmen, to become a plumber in urban districts of Shanghai, where such menial work was snubbed.
He was paid 50 yuan (US$8) a month, a salary so low that most of his colleagues eventually sought better-paying jobs elsewhere. Even today, Huang's monthly salary of about 3,000 yuan isn't all that much above the city's monthly minimum wage of 2,300 yuan.
Huang started to work for the Urban Real Estate Management Bureau in Putuo District in the early 1980s. At that time, governments or their entities owned and managed nearly all residential properties, and many such complexes were in a state of dire disrepair.
"In an old apartment building, one meter used to cover all households, so it would take a lot of time to locate the problem when a power failure happened," he says, adding that rampant irregularities in use of electricity and messy circuitry only made things worse.
He remembers once it took him long hours to fix a power failure that affected about 20 households.
Plumbing work came up against the same problem of old, decaying infrastructure.
"Sometimes it took me up to five hours to figure out where a sewer pipe led and to pinpoint the location of a problem," Huang notes.