plumbers

I'm on my fourth (yes, 4!) round of plumbers here this month. When I got back after Christmas break, I noticed that when I used my washer, my bathtub filled with water. Not a good sign. Then, when I'd shower, sometimes water would come out the kitchen sink. Also bad news.

Well, my landlord quickly called a big plumbing company. They came out with a very long metal tube thing, snaked it through my pipes and said "Huzzah: fixed!" (well, that's not a quote, but you get the general idea.) That afternoon, I ran my wash, and yet again, the tub filled, and this time water also leaked out of my toilet! (gross!) So, they came back and ran the metal tube/snake again.

All was fine and good for 1.5 weeks, at which point, the washer draining into the tub situation started happening again. So, the same two men came back to my house for yet another time. They did some things on the roof this time, and were sure the problem was fixed. Two days later, doing the wash, a tiny bit of water drained into the tub. Not nearly as much as before, but still a bad sign.

Well, at this point, the city got involved. It turns out the problem may or may not have to do with the city sewer, so some nice men (it's always two men, for some reason), just came over to my house and asked me lots of questions about my house's plumbing (which I know so very little about! I couldn't even tell them whether my house has a crawlspace.) When I told them about the draining into the tub, one of them said "Wow; that's awful. I wouldn't want to live like that!" (Which I thought was a bit dramatic, but still nicely empathetic.) At the end of the plumbing interview, they promised to come back & run a tv camera through my pipes!

Well, then the original plumbers called, and offered to come sometime with their own pipe-video systems as well as some other sort of new-fangled pipe cleaning techniques. And then my landlord called. He said that I have 100-year old clay pipes. Hmm. So--it's possible that one of them has just, as he put it "Crumbled!" In the meantime, he had obviously called back the plumbers and been a bit more forceful, because they offered to come anytime, today, tonight, tomorrow morning, this weekend. Such service. We're on a first name basis. (Actually, we're on a last name basis too.) But when the plumbing company man called and said, "Hi Beth, this is Rob," I thought, "Perhaps I know my plumber a little too well."

Alas, today, I'm very glad I'm a renter and don't have to pay for any of these things. I'm also glad that, so far, I can still use my bathroom and water while they figure this out & that I haven't had a big flood.

*I realize, writing this, that it sounds like I do laundry twice-a-day or something. I don't.