Associations, not a peep out of you, the plumbing, and more. This diary was brought to you by the word ‘drip,’ the letter ‘p,’ and the number ‘i.’
I. A Rude Awakening
I go to bed too late. Reading, writing, working my way through the last of my legacy WordPress installs before deleting them.
Shortly after 5 I am awoken by the cats’ mayhem. More or less on-time they get fed, and I return to bed.
Not long after 7 Ms. S. returns, retires to bed, and regales me with tales to frustrate and delight about the homeless guy who invaded the lobby, taxis, and drunkards. A brief survey indicated that in the wake of the Tide’s loss A&M fans were well-behaved, early to bed and early to rise, and on the road around 6, whereas the natives were restless and distraught, drowning their sorrows in Natty Light and the like.
But story time was interrupted by the sound of a drip. A new drip. A drip coming from our apartment. Not the sound of an errant water heater, not exactly the sound of a kitchen faucet rebelling against running dry. More a plop. Plop plop. And so on …
II. Flashback
My first ‘plumbing’ disaster would have occurred when I was a child and it had nothing to do with me. Before my fifth birthday we moved across state lines into a newly built home on an acre and a third of land. We were a couple miles outside the city limits — the city at that time had fewer than 7,000 residents –, and all of us in this small, dead-end subdivision had septic tanks and used well water.
Maintaining the septic tank was a routine procedure, and every so often the proper truck would roll along the pathway through the garden and orchard to the pasture, locate the proper spot, open the hatch, and suck it clean.
It always smelled. A smell both unforgettable and indescribable.
A couple years into our tenure there a significant drought began. Many years later we noticed it in the winter months, with insignificant snow in the valley, and warmer temperatures resulting in more rain than snow, but early on it was just a matter of hot, dry summers.
And a sinking of the water table.
One morning one summer our well ran dry and began spitting up sandy sludge into the sinks. As soon as possible my parents hired a well digger to come out and deepen our well. In a way we were lucky because the well was located in the front yard, so it was easy to access from the street, but it also necessitated taking down part of the fence and destroying a number of flower beds. And this was not an immediate, fixed-in-a-day procedure.
And, no, we were not going to move out of the house and into a motel for the duration.
Instead we hooked together several garden hoses and piped water from our neighbor’s house to our own, and this steady, albeit low-pressure, stream of liquid sustained us for a couple days.
III. The Plot Thickens
… to the bathroom we both followed our ears — metaphorically, as they were still attached to our heads –, where we found swelling puddles and general wetness.
Major moisture. Colonel dampness. Private puddles. Captain droplet.
Over the shower curtain rod, where already there was a degree of brown rot brought on from previous drippity-droppity-dew, there was a symphony of water drops lining up almost two feet into the room along the rod and then falling. Then from the overhead fan we had constant contributions falling at a rapid rate. This was novel. Whereas the former hit the rod and the side of the tub before splashing either into the tub or onto the floor, the latter either hit the lip or the toilet or the tile floor.
Ms. S. gathered towels from the hall closet to soak up the water, while I captured video of the event as documentation and sought the weekend/emergency maintenance phone number.
Which I could not find. We used to have a piece of paper with it, but I misplaced it. The note that Kenny left Tuesday when he worked on the water heater while I was out probably had the number; I tossed it Wednesday. I looked online but could only find the main maintenance number, which just rang and rang.
Eventually I came across a flyer we’d received at the beginning of the month providing news, specials, coupons, and the like, which also mentioned the emergency maintenance number at the bottom. I, now dressed, stepped outside for better cell reception, called, and described my problem to the person on call, and she promised to send someone out.
Meanwhile the ceiling stopped dripping.
IV. Unrelated Reflections
Growing up in the country I was not surrounded by honest-to-god plumbers. They were merely a stereotype straight out of caricatures of northeastern cities, especially Philly, Boston, or even New York.
This was not aided by the arrival of the biggest pop-culture plumbers of my generation: Mario and Luigi. I remember the television show, mostly live action; I was more fond of the ‘Legend of Zelda’ animated series. We already had an NES by that point, though it was more my brother’s console than mine, whereas I spent much more time on the Apple //e. He, thus, became quite good at ‘Super Mario Bro.’ (1985), whereas I always lagged. But what the game supplied for both of us was a plethora of pipes.
Pipes everywhere … everywhere as location as well as destination. Much later I went to graduate school at a university known for its approximately ten miles of steam tunnels. And ‘Tunnel Bob.’ And so on. Later Senator Ted Stevens referred to the internet as “a series of tubes.” But back from tunnels and tubes but remaining with computers, when I got involved with Linux I learned to refer to the following character — “|” — as a ‘pipe,’ which is used, among other places, on the command line when ‘piping’ the output of one command to the input of another.
Then 2009 arrived, and with it “Inglourious Basterds” and its wonderful opening milk and pipes scene.
When I think of pipes, these are the things I think of.
V. Continuation, Confirmation, and Complication
Ms. S. went to sleep. A few minutes passed.
A knock came at the door, and I let Larry in; he’s probably getting tired of coming out. I showed him the bathroom and described what we experienced. He then went upstairs to visit our neighbor and survey the situation. He returned a few minutes later to report back to me. In short an upstairs pipe or fixture has corroded somewhere around our neighbor’s shower and it’s obviously leaking and in need of being replaced. He relayed this information to the neighbor, too, indicating that while it was an inconvenience, the shower should no longer be used. And he’ll be out Monday morning, some time after 8, to work in our bathroom, tearing out part of the ceiling to get at the pipes above.
Which is fine with me. As I reported, I didn’t want the leaking to get worse, resulting in the ceiling sagging and then collapsing, as a water-related disaster ended precisely in this back in 2009. That, however, ended up being a huge chunk of ceiling in our living room. But the point here is similar: better safe than sorry.
Larry left. I returned to my work. At a later point I heard a drip.
Drip drip.
Plop plop.
I went to the offending room and took my phone with me. And spent quite while recording the dripping water. Three minutes into a light drip one of the upstairs neighbors (I’m not sure how many people live there) decided to run the shower again, and almost immediately the dripping picked up. I had to shuffle already soaked towels around to catch the wider dispersal pattern. And because I found it fascinating, I just kept recording until the drips had nearly ceased. About an eighteen minute video.
Thank you, neighbors, for being so neighborly. Perhaps you would like to come down and clean my bathroom for me. Thank you for disregarding the what the maintenance guy told you.
But by before noon there was no longer any dripping, and so I took all the towels and dumped them in the washing machine. And after my writing session I put them in the dryer. And before I woke Ms. S. up in the afternoon I folded their soft fabric, stacked them, and stored them in the hall closet. Everything looks fine, but we’ll probably lay out a few towels in the bathroom tonight just in case the neighbors return to their obnoxiously selfish ways before Larry arrives in the morning.
Appendix
- 11 Things You Didn’t Know about Natty Light
- Steam Tunnels
- UW Madison Steam Tunnel System
- UW underground (Dec. 7, 1999)
- Tunnel Bob, Robert Gruenenwald
- This is not a Pipe
- Series of Tubes (Know Your Meme)
