[OT] [WAY OT!] A triumph over time and matter - Yet another maddog story (fwd)

[Jon maddog Hall]

Hi,

This may seem small and insignificant to you, but to me it is a triumph over
time and matter....especially matter.

Now I am not the handiest of people around the house.  My idea of taking care
of yardwork is sitting on the top of my riding lawn mower and trying to avoid
driving into the pond.  While I can swing a hammer with the best of them, the
complexities of fixing plumbing is something I feel is best left to a plumber.

And water is one of those things that I seem to constantly do battle with.
It is seldom where I really want it, and it always seems to be where I do
not want it.  Twice I have had leaky pipes or water heaters or something
deliver lots of water to my club basement, making my wall-to-wall carpet
into a squishy mess.

We put roofs on our houses to keep water out, pipes in the walls to bring
water in, drains on the floor to let water out, and it never really seems
to work in concert.

Over the past three years my bathroom sink has been getting slower and
slower.  I would, from time to time, put some of this organic "clog helper"
down the sink, let it sit there a while, put hot water down it and watch the
sink get better for a day or two.  But it would always return to its sluggish
ways.  I did not want to put anything stronger down the sink, because I have
a septic system, and the previous owner of the house once gave me the sage
advice of "never put anything into your septic tank that you would refuse to
eat".  Well, I have put some "stuff" in there that I would not eat, but
mostly it is organic "stuff" that has been cycled through the human body, so
SOMEONE ate it....

A few weeks ago my sink started getting critical, and I decided to pour a
couple of bottles of liquid plumber ("SAFE FOR SEPTIC SYSTEMS") down the drain
to see if that worked.  Nada.  Bottle after bottle, waiting the obligatory
15 minutes, pouring hot water following it.  Nothing.

Then this morning the sink was really bad, and the toothpaste rince just kind of
swirled around in the bowl like some mystical cloud, and the water took a good
five minutes to go down the drain.  Sadly I thought about calling the plumber,
and how much money that would cost me.  I started looking around for other
things he could do to make the trip more cost-effective.  Unclogging the
bathtub drain would be another thing, as that was getting slow too.  Perhaps
the plumber could be coerced into doing electrical work....nahhh, water and
electricity don't mix that well.

But before I put in that dreaded call, I remembered an old Three Stooges
clip where they were plumbers, and they used a plumber's snake to clear the
pipes.  So with one last try I went to the store to buy one.

Now a side note about the Stooges.  A lot of people think they were just
silly commedians, but they did a lot of things in common life.  And basically
if you just did what they did NOT do, you would be fine.

So there I was in the local 84 Lumber company going up and down the isles
looking for "snakes".  I was dreading the cost of such a complex piece of
equipment, when I found a whole wall of them, different sizes, and was amazed
that the one that seemed the "right size for me" was only about $5.00!  That
was about the cost of *one* bottle of Liquid Plumber!  No, this could not
possibly work!  It was too cheap a solution!  So I bought two, just to make
the solution a little more expensive.  To make me feel better about waiting
three years to do this.  One snake was a fancy roll-up flat ribbon type of
snake that came in its own container like a measuring tape and the other was a
very long and thin coiled spring with a handle that allowed to you grap it and
rotate it in the plumbing.  Both were less than $5. each.

I took them home, removed the stopper from the sink and shoved the flat metal
snake down the sink as far as it would go, wiggled it around a bit, and pulled
it out.  Stuck to the end was some "stuff" (we really do not want to describe
it more than that, trust me), which I then took over to the toilet and flushed
it down the toilet's (much larger) drain and into my septic tank, where I am
sure it is happy with the other "stuff" there.  However, it was not very much
"stuff", and I could not imagine that it was the only thing that was clogging
the sink's drain.

So back at the sink I was sure that it was not fixed, and that there HAD to be
more to it than that.  After all, I had only expended $10 (and really had
only needed to spend $5.), used five minutes of my time and gotten a bit of
"stuff" out of the sink (although I also had the feeling I had shoved more
"stuff" further down the drain).  So I turned on the hot water (as the snake
instructions said to do), and,,,,,Voila! Water flowed down the drain!

I don't mean it just *flowed* down the drain, it FLOWED, SWIRLED, GURGLED, and
just kind of JUMPED down the drain.  It was like a waterfall, or a whirlpool,
it was a CELEBRATION of water flowing down the drain.  I could NOT believe it!
I put the stopper back in place and filled the entire bowl with hot water, then
opened up the drain.  In less than five seconds it was empty again, with a
satisfying gurgling sound coming from the sink that I had not heard in a long
time (if ever) from that piece of porcelin.

Impressed with how easy that was, I turned to the bathtub drain.  That had never
had quite the crisis that the sink had, but I had repeatedly taken the plunger
to it.  Push, PUSH, turn, *TURN* went the snake, and then the bathtub drain
was also clear.  "Noooooo, there has to be some trick, something going wrong.."
I thought.  But there wasn't.  Both drains now gurgled happily.

So I curled the snake up again, carefully wiping it dry as the directions said,
and I will put it away in a safe place for the next time.

Tomorrow will be a hard day.  I have to go down to the Brazilian Consulate in
Boston and beg them for a Business Visa in less than one day, so I can meet
my obligations to my friends in Brazil (another long story).  I am afraid that
our current administration's policies on visa administration will make it
very hard for me to do this.  I will have to get up very early, and I am sure
that the whole ordeal will be stressful.

But I will have this one little victory to think about, one little thing
to buoy me up.....a gurgling drain in my bathroom, solved for less than $10.

I wish all of life's problems were as easily solved.

Warmest regards,

maddog
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.672.4557       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
WWW: http://www.li.org

Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association

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