Unearthing a life.....

I am duly aware that there are a double handful of burning issues in today's news that cry out for a touch of my attention. I am also duly aware that these burning issues will get a big touch of attention from the likes of John Stewart, Keith Oberman, and the late-night talkshow hosts. So I am inclined to let all these appealing targets wander over into someone else's shooting gallery. And I will address a personal smoldering issue that I feel certain no one else will touch upon. Not even remotely.

Poltergeists in the Plumbing or Hey, Maw, I never saw it comin'!

I have noticed, over the full course of my life, that plumbing is a delicate assortment of checks and balances and that they slightest touch to any part of it can have serious consequences.

Plumbing is the natural home of poltergeists. When there is no damage to be done elsewhere, they retire to the relative peace and quite of good a p-trap or shower drain, or loosely rolled garden hose (even). And ill will befall any who disturb them. That was me. I disturbed them. Ill befell me.

The toilet seat on the small downstairs bathroom fell to wrack and ruin. The seat part came totally loose from the hinging part .... broken loose.
The hinge fasteners going down through the porcelin were magnificently corroded. I knew there were easily removeable plastic fasteners just out of sight on the other end of these bolts. In my imagination.

Turns out these plastic fasteners were encased in corrosion generated by the metal bolts and had become, so to speak, 'one with the bolts'. A zen sort of oneness .... impenetrable. I sweated and swore for a half hour while uselessly wielding various screwdrivers and wrenches and pliers. A lot of pain, no gain.

Idea number 2: lie down on the floor so that I can see the plastic fasteners and using the arm not being laid upon to cut the plastic with my very sharp box-knife. Fifteen minutes more, a lot of sweat, breath rasping, absolutely no progress. So I decide to get up. Oops!

I am jammed between the wall and the stool .... I'm in an 's' shape and my butt is against a box of who knows and I cannot wiggle my way back out. I can't lift myself because I'm laying on my lifting arm and it's flat on the floor. After much flailing around with my free arm, I manage to get a pressure grip on the far side of the stool and lift enough to get my down-arm into action. Extraction was a success from there.

Now I'm running into hour two and everything is right where it was when I started.

This story is much longer than I thought and I have to get me downstairs and prepare Dr. Bookworm's evening repast for when she gets home at 7:20 after a seven client day.

Okay - back again. At this point my highly skilled back is against the wall and my pipefitting manhood stands in serious question. What, I ask myself, would a 'days work for a day's pay' navyyard pipefitter do in an emergency like this(?). And I answered myself, "Time to break out the hacksaw!"

It's easy to say 'time to break out the hacksaw' .... six words, mostly one-syllable. It's quite another thing to actually 'break out the hacksaw'. This line of action presupposes that you have some foggy idea where the hacksaw is. I presupposed it would be in the toolbox ... it being a tool and all you know. It wasn't. So I backed my car out of the garage so's I could launch a frontal attack on the misc storage area established therein.

Ten minutes of unstacking boxes and prying through things, finally produced my trusty, rusty, probably second-hand in the first place hacksaw. With that in hand, I made a second foray into the bathroom and proceeded to hack the heads off the bolts. Sounds easy in the telling. Ain't in the doing. I had to get enough 'play' in the bolts to slip the blade in between the porcelin and the underside of the bolt heads. More grunting and groaning and swearing and finally the sawing began. Normal hacksawing is kind of done in the open with a certain high-spirited free movement of the saw back and forth. This hacksawing was in a different dimension. A pinched and cramped and blade-jamming dimension.

But eventually there were two PINGS! and two bolt heads had gone flying. And I could barely breathe anymore. Wheeze, wheeze, wheeze! The piteous sound of victory over a water closet.

I quickly installed the sparkling new white toilet seat and was so flushed with success that I trotted up to the master bathroom and replaced the old showerhead and repaired the gizmo under one of the sinks that makes the plunger/stopper work.

I do not know where I went wrong. I don't know where that plumbing poltergeist was sleeping when I apparently awoke and irritated the scurvy devil. But he rose up against me and smote me mightily .... the very next day (Saturday).

In the evening hours, Dr. Bookworm retired to her bath and, on completing that sojourn, pulled the plug. Sitting downstairs where I was enjoying my dinner of pasta, I heard a strange and suspicious sound issuing from the little bathroom. A sloshing, wet sort of sound. I was up with a bound (and forgetting to breathe) and dashed to the bathroom door. Gadzooks!

From beneath the hard-won new white toilet seat, water was pouring out onto the bathroom floor and beginning to run out onto the hallway rug. I tore through the house looking for my squeegee mop .... found it finally .... then another search for the bucket .... didn't find it and had to select a substitute. Then spent twenty minutes mopping and removing the water trapped in the bathroom. Breathing hard again.

The poltergeist had struck back with a vengence. Complete plumbing blockage. He won, I lost.

On Sunday, the Roto-Rooter man came to make what was bad good again. The Roto-Rooter man is likely expensive on his normal workdays .... but he is into the financial stratosphere on Sundays. He dug down to the septic tank and pulled the cover where he could put in his Rooter. The Rooter went in about 24 inches and then set up a dreadful shrieking .... causing rooter-man to yank it back out with a puzzled look and the statement, "Gee, don't know what that hit ... it can usually go right through a big root."

So he got back on the shovel and started digging out the pipe leading to the house. The problem was quickly uncovered. Two feet beyond the septic tank the four inch plastic drain piping had collapsed .... collapsed and pinched flat. So $60 per quarter hour rooter-man drove back to his homebase and got replacement piping and fittings. He fixed it all in two hours and forty-five minutes beginning to end and the bill was $669.

That is the work of the Devil. Or at least of his agent, the Plumbing Poltergeist. It was a hard fought game and though I seem to have eventually won ... I was definitely in over my head.

Never touch your plumbing. Ever.