Easter Sunday

There’s a guy I work with every once in awhile whose career revolves around making sure that sewage gets from where it starts to where it needs to go in a manner that does not attract undue attention. Usually this work is just once of the many things that Joe the Plumber does, but this particular guy doesn’t assemble pipe or solder fittings or install water heaters. He spends his days clearing out sewer lines by jetting water at high pressure through clogs; using medieval style cutting heads on the end of his jets to cut through nasty debris; and checking his work with a camera that scopes and locates lines far underground and tells us what condition they’re in. The resultant video tapes (now he uses DVDs), known as “dirty movies”, are invaluable to property owners and landlords that need to maintain the arteries of crap, as nothing defines squalor more than sitting in 2” of filth because the orifices in your waste pipes are overwhelmed with, well, waste.

He is an interesting character, Robert is. With a Scottish brogue that is not nearly as thick as Groundskeeper Willie’s, he still talks about extracting DEbrree from pipes with a glint in his eye, as if the relief exacted from the operation is actually a release of pressure in his own body.

He’s done quite well cleaning and filming sewer lines, and the most tedious part of his job is cleaning his equipment. I’d say it’s constantly being covered in filth, but that’s just me.

I wished he was at my parents’ house on Easter Sunday.

While we were cooking and cleaning up after the feast, my mother and brother in law were furtively active in the basement, having mentioned that there was a minor stoppage in the wash basin that takes the discharge from the clothes washer. Nothing a little Drano couldn’t fix, so things seemed fine. Until we went downstairs and saw that the dishwater wasn’t going down the drain, instead it was overflowing the basin and creating general havoc on the floor. The kitchen sink sewage wasn’t getting past a clog just past the wash basin in the basement, so it was going into the only catch basin it could find, and Drano wasn’t working.

So we bailed the greywater into buckets and dumped it all into the toilet, continuing to do so as dishes were washed upstairs, and seeing how Drano splattered on my shirt creates neat new patterns, though not nearly as fun as tie dye. The next day the plumber came and used his electric snake to power past the clog, and everything is running clean again.

Turns out that the DEbrree in the pipes, which is usually loose, greasy, and in a more liquefied state in normal house operations seemed to calcify and harden over the past few months, as both of my parents were on the other side of the world while we were all being buried in snow. While we would periodically check the house to make sure that the mail wasn’t piling up and the roof wasn’t caving in, virtually no water ran through the waste lines. Therein lay the source of the clog—usually on the dirty movies we see a diaper or tampon or some other not-supposed-to-flush object as the major culprit, but in this case, a general lack of activity gummed up the works.

Much like the human body. Keep those wheels turning. Your veins, arteries, and heart will thank you.