The Aerie
All I wanted to do was shave. That's all. A little lather, a little razor, a little blood, a little alcohol, a little screaming, and in five minutes, I figured, I would be finished.
Of course it didn't turn out that way... or why would I be blogging it?
All the steps through screaming went swimmingly. I trimmed my beard so that the needle swung back from "Grizzly Adams" and quivvered just shy of "Dapper." I was applying little bits of toilet paper to stanch the blood that threatened to stain my shirt when I looked down. The sink looked like Straits of Florida a week before Spring Training, with thousands of little beard trimmings fleeing the tyranny of the faucet for the opportunity represented by that nameless hole in the front of the sink that keeps the drain from bubbling.
Their voyage was smooth and calm, because the sink was not draining.
Now, I could have left it. I could have done like everyone else in my family and pretended not to notice that the sink wasn't draining. By the time I got back from work, the sink would either have drained or evaporated, right?
But noooooo....
Two hours later I emerged from beneath the sink, frustrated. I couldn't find my plumbing snake, and after extracting the usual mess from the elbow joint and the drain rocker, the water still wasn't going down the pipe.
I had found my wife's Grandfather's old plumbing snake -- a treasured heirloom in the form of a thick ribbon of metal suitable for binding one of King Kong's ankles -- and tried it to no avail. I found an increasingly-rare wire coathanger, but it couldn't make its way far enough up the pipe: clearly the clog was at the very end of the horizontal drain pipe, right where the water plunges into the vertical shaft that also serves the kitchen sink on the other side of the wall. I tried the shopvac on both "suck" and "blow" settings and I was so frustrated by that time that neither joke occurred to me. Finally I ran the hose in from outside, jammed it in the pipe, and turned it on.
Nothing. All the water reversed course and drained back into the bucket. The clog in that tunnel is as smelly and hard to dislodge as Tom DeLay.
Having sacrificed a morning's work, all I had to show for my efforts was a filthy bathroom floor, gunk stains on my shirt, and the acquired, persistent smell of that gunk soaked right into my fingers.
So I put the piping back together, I removed my equipment, I put away my tools, and washed the gunk off my hands, scrubbing twice to get rid of the smell. When I was finished, the water remained in the sink.
I pretended that I didn't notice it.
Posted by Albatross at April 18, 2005 10:59 PM