This state of affairs, among numerous others, including the invention of the more restrictive species of women's undergarments, denies the existance of the Deity, and upon the vanishingly small chance of the Good Uncle's continued life after death, he intends to have a sharp word with Him on that very topic.
As a case in point, Uncle Jimbo's drains have become troublesome.
"Troublesome" in this context means clogged partly or mostly up, and as these things go, it usually requires a major loss of convenience before I get motivated to actually do anything about it. And, as sometimes happens, it annoyed me, and my standard response to being annoyed is to tough it out.
They may well write that sentiment on my tombstone.
I went down to the grocery store, and bought a bottle of "Maximum Strength!" stuff guaranteed in writing to send hair, soap scum, and grease packing. The main ingredients seemed to be sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide, making me wonder why I didn't just go out and buy some lye and be done with it.
No effect. I dumped a bunch of it down the misbehaving drain, and while it seemed to actually drain through, it didn't really change anything. I was still up to my calves in the shower, and the washer tub continued to overflow. Plainly, this was going to require more muscle.
I remembered that at Home Depot (from which anything in the home maintenance universe can be had) I had once spotted a quart bottle emblazoned with skull and crossbones, and dire warnings about what would happen if the contents touched bare skin, and claimed to be a professional strength drain opener. That memory motivated me to a closer look, and I was highly amused to find that you can purchase retail a rather impure, but righteously concentrated (about 12 molar) quantity of sulphuric acid. Now, if there were a like quality of nitric acid available, things could get very interesting indeed, though the Fourth of July is yet some months away.
Such are the fruits of a failed undergraduate degree in chemistry, and if I hadn't managed to flood the floor of the lab with about 2,000 gallons of water during an experiment in which the cold water supply feed to a condenser slipped off, I might not be hacking code today. It took two people most of a day to clean it all up, and the professors whose offices were underneath the deluge were highly unamused.
Given the above, I felt it best to exercise restraint. The first restraint I exercised was to dump the quart of concentrated H2SO4 down the recalcitrant drain, after making ritual obesiance to the epigram about acid to water. The drain inhaled deeply, bubbled malevolently for about twenty minutes, and expelled a pint of extraordinarily foul-smelling black viscous fluid and enough noxious gas to blind a warthog.
I urged the bathroom fan to high and reconciled myself to the use of a backyard tree until it cleared up. That took the better part of forty-eight hours and made an extra adventure of those midnight trips to what should have been a nice enclosed, even warm, bathroom.
All that to the hindmost, I was in charge of my life. I was having to deal with a certain amount of chemical overkill, but it was all for the best. That is, I was willing to put up with some trouble in order to not stand up to my calves in the shower. I was, that is, until I found that even an impressive amount of concentrated H2SO4 didn't materially change the drain situation. I was still standing up to my calves in shower water, and mopping up the overflow from the washer tub. The washroom floor was now by far the cleanest in the house, but the cost seemed too high.
I had clean, no doubt well-etched drains, mind you, but they didn't drain any faster. Or, slowly, if at all. And this, Beloved Reader, is the point at which I began to have hourly conversations with myself. Let Uncle Jimbo advise you, when things reach the talking-to-yourself stage, no good issues forth, you have left all reason behind. I considered the alternatives.
I could bail and call in the Roto-Rooter folks, and admit that I am less than yuppie scum, or I could deal with it myself. I picked the latter and went back to Home Depot, and found there a drain snake, one like the Roto-Rooter people use, except smaller. This unit has twenty-file feet of coiled wire, could be operated either by hand or propelled with an electric drill, of which I have several.
I took it home, attached to my single-speed junk drill, jammed about five feet of snake into the misbehaving drain, and cranked it up. Ten seconds later, I had five feet of drain snake wrapped tightly around my left arm, and I'm not sure that the limits of topology weren't exceeded in the process. The drill was starting to smoke, and I was losing circulation, so I turned it off. It took quite some time to extricate my arm, and the Gentle Reader will be happy to know that the hair is growing back quite nicely.
It was time to admit that I really had no idea what I was doing, and I had no choice but the Last Resort. I was going to have to Read The Instructions, a fate nearly worse than Death. I steeled myself, and opened the pamphlet that came with the snake. After a paragraph or two of really quite sensible advice, I came to the crux of my problem, which was that only a knothead would try to use this snake with a single-speed drill, and it said so in a 48 point font.
I was beginning to have a newfound respect for the Roto-Rooter people, but I was in this far, and couldn't give up. I hauled snake, drill, and assorted paraphernalia to the next closest drain, which was in the kitchen. This time I was able to get all twenty-five feet of the snake through the drain, and was rewarded with a rather foul-looking chunk of hair.
Speaking of which, you do not want to mess with the stuff that lines the walls of your pipes. I don't know what exactly it's composed of, but I do know that it takes obscene amounts of detergent to get it off your skin. I sacrificed a pair of leather work gloves to the effort.
Flushed, so to speak, with success, I immediately tried to take a shower and run a load of laundry. This time, things were definitely different. Where before I had a grace period of several minutes before the washtub overflowed, it was now a matter of seconds. At this point, I was grinding my teeth at night, making copious use of corporate shower facilities, and buying new underclothing every couple of days. I began to hear the clog sneer at me when I walked into the kitchen or bathroom, and I could swear that the washer was questioning my technical manhood.
The problem is that I knew (approximately) where the clog was, but getting at it directly would require dismantling a bunch of pipe, and given my current track record, I wasn't too sure I'd actually get it all back in functioning order, at least before the the millenium. I was beginning to yearn for the days in which I rented my plumbing.
It was time to Make A Grand Gesture. "It's you or me, Jack", I snarled, "I've got nothing but time on my hands. And a drain snake."
And, you know, after only a couple of hour drain-snaking sessions, I now have fairly free-running drains, an amazing collection of hair clumps, and the plumbing no longer sneers at me in the night. I occasionally have to resnake that drain (its geometry seems to make it vulnerable to occlusion), but I have it down to a fifteen minute operation.
There is a Lesson here, and I think it's that occasionally you have to mount a white charger, grab a drain snake, and dare inanimate objects to do their worst.
The trick is doing it without losing all the hair on your left arm.
Copyright 1997 James M. Putnam, All Rights Reserved