The Great Kitchen Flood of 1995
Dec. 23rd, 1995 07:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jamesqBefore the blizzard of ‘96 was the flood of ‘95. As with most calamities, it started out small, kind of like Hitler.
I was preparing for another brave day of computer sales at Office Depot… Many a brave CPU would be captured and sold to executives who would pay much to have such a prize displayed proudly on their desk.
Having finished performing the ritual of the 3S’s, I walked down the hallway of my apartment. About midway, my feet began to… squelch in the carpet.
Only a select few know the true feeling of squelching, it being more than just the sensation of stepping into something damp and clammy. Anyone who has walked on the beach and stepped into a patch of seaweed thinks they know, but they do not. No, the true feeling of squelchiness can only be achieved by stepping into something that not only will mess you up, but you know, on an almost psychic level, that it will go on messing you up for quite a while. On a scale of 1 to 10, stepping into cat vomit and feeling the residue squeeze into the pores of your sock is a 1. Hearing the land mine click from pressure as you step on it is a 10.
Feeling my carpet squelch was about a 3.
By this point, my socks were sopping wet, so I figured nothing else could go wrong. I moved to the kitchen to see what the hell had happened. Was it the refrigerator? had it become unplugged, necessitating our throwing away of at least $5 dollars worth of ketchup and (not so frozen) vegetables? Or was it the sink. Turns out it was the sink.
Tracing the sound of dribbling water, I looked under our sink, where we keep our tools and other non-perishable, but oh-so-rustable items. I quickly determined that the cold water intake pipe is leaking like a sieve. Being the clever, university-educated man that I am, I determined that turning off the water to this pipe would stop the source of the leak, after which I could call building maintenance, let them handle the problem while I went to work. So I turned off the pipe. It exploded.
Now most people when the hear the word “exploded” think of the special effects extravaganzas that we all grew up on. These involve fire and light and sparks and smoke. But water can explode too.
The pipe blew out of from behind the wall, causing an explosion of water directly into my face, causing much sputtering. I immediately tore off my work shirt and tried to jam it into the hole to stop the beginning flood. This proved ineffective (or as my id was whispering to me: “Fat lot of good this is doing”).
To truly appreciate the amount of water pouring, nay, blasting out of my wall, try to imagine having a bucket of water dumped on your head every second. Or just imagine your in the shower, but the water pressure is about triple what your used to, and it’s cold, and you have your clothing on, and your comic collection is on the floor twenty feet away, and there’s nothing you can do.
After two minutes of desperately trying to reattach the pipe, using a golf shirt as a substitute for soldiered copper pipe, I decided to alert my roommate Bruce, mostly because my hands were going numb from the cold, but also because misery loves company.
I sprinted down the hall (Squelchsquelchsquelch) thumped on his door and requested that he call building maintenance at his earliest convenience. I then ran back down the hall (Squelchsquelchsquelch) to once again do my imitation of the little Dutch boy.
Bruce dashed into the hall, whereupon he made two, almost simultaneous sounds. The first was “squelch”, then he said “Nyaigh” (if you are reading this story to someone, you owe it to them to put just the right emphasis on “Nyaigh”. Really warble it, with a quick inhale about midway through, like someone had just tossed a ice cube down the back of your shirt.).
Squelching down the hall, Bruce immediately called down to the apartment office to have them turn off the water. Now I wasn’t listening to their conversation, but I do know the person who answers the phone. Gently put, this lady is not encumbered with a vast intellect.
The train of events from her end proceed like so:
1) Bruce tells her that a torrent of water is blasting out into our kitchen and that it will reach biblical proportions within minutes.
2) Office Lady’s brain (using a virtual memory algorithm rejected by Microsoft as being too slow and too riddled with bugs) page faults.
3) Bruce emphasises that the first course of action should be to turn off the water at whatever source will stop the flow the fastest.
4) Office Lady’s brain makes a feeble attempt to comprehend what is going on, pages faults again, then does a selection sort on an unordered, linked-list of tenant problems. Stops at “sink is leaking”, which while true, lacks the urgency of our problem.
5) Office Lady says she will call the maintenance manager, then hangs up to do so.
At this point Bruce and I (I having abandoned my job as sacrificial victim to the buildings resident naïad) begin rescuing items on the floor of our apartment, because at this point their is an inch of water in the kitchen, and their is a visible line of sopping wet carpet against dry carpet, which is expanding away from the kitchen at a rate that gave us about a minute and a half before it reached the far wall. Bruce went for his Sports Illustrated, and electronic putting green. I went for my comic books (rescuing them I might add, the only casualty being Spiderman 2099 #40, which sucked anyway).
Meanwhile in the east tower, Office Lady is radioing the maintenance man (who later told us that he was about to shut off his radio and have a coffee break). “West 2008’s sink is leaking” she mooed.
After five minutes, Bruce and I had thrown everything that could be thrown, up onto every raised surface in the living room. We climbed on top of two couches to marvel at the geyser of water blasting out from under our sink. At this point the entire apartment was flooded except for the two bedrooms, which were a sort of high ground for the place. At this point we had achieved about a 6 on the squelch meter.
After ten minutes we hear the elevator reach our floor, Bruce wades over to the let the maintenance guy in. At this point the water in the public areas of our apartment was an inch above the carpet. The water had spread out the front door to about half way to the elevator shaft, a truly spectacular achievement when you consider we have a corner apartment at the very end of the hallway.
The maintenance guy saunters out of the elevator, turns towards our apartment and did his very best imitation of a ‘toon. His jaw dropped to his sternum and he “Woowoo”ed as good as Daffy Duck.
At this point the naïad of the apartment possessed his mind. He rushed into the apartment and dived into the torrent of water erupting from under our sink, replacing me as the god’s sacrificial victim.
That or he was trying to shut off the water as I had done. To his credit, it took him about a minute to realise how futile this was, whereas it had taken me about three minutes to realise this. Of course, I’m just a computer geek. Put him in front of a computer and see how long it takes him to debug code.
Our saviour then ran out to turn off the water. Five minutes later we could hear the water pressure start to drop. Five minutes after that it stopped entirely. He returned later with the carpet guys and the plumber. The plumber took 2 minutes to reset the pipe, the carpet guys took 2 hours soaking up all the water. They used two (2) wet vacs to suck up all this water, emptying one into the sink, and the other off our balcony (I should point out that our apartment is about 200 feet above 9th avenue… by the time the water hit the ground it had turned into snow).
We had to move everything in the apartment to one of three places: The far wall of my bedroom, the far wall of Bruce’s bedroom, and the balcony (The next day, me and my dad came with a huge orange tarp to cover up all the stuff on the balcony, this had the dual effect of protecting our living room furniture from the elements, and of identifying our apartment as unique for a six block radius… “Which apartment is yours James?”, “It’s that big orange one their on the third building past the CanOxy tower”). We moved everything while the carpet guys were soaking up our rug. “Will we be able to move all this stuff back in a few hours?” I (foolishly) asked. “Try a few days” says carpet guy #1.
While doing all this moving, Carpet Guy #1 says “It’s too bad your apartment had to flood today, we were booked solid with jobs, tomorrow would have been much more convenient”.
“Sorry”, Bruce said “We’ll try to book ahead for our next flood”.
By the time they were finished, all the public areas were empty, and they had set up these huge fans under the carpets (the carpet padding was torn out, being a lost cause. In much the same way trying to stem the flow of water with a golf shirt was a lost cause). When turned on the fans made the carpet undulate in a way that unpleasantly reminded me of a hot tub full of Shoggoths.
We made our escape, running back to mommy and daddy’s as fast as we could. As we were leaving, the carpet guys and the Maintenance Manager were methodically checking all the ‘08 apartments below us for flood damage (they were still finding it when they hit 908 apparently) Bruce and I figured that if an angry mob of torch wielding tenants came for our blood, we would point up and say “Are you going to get those bastards in 2108 who flooded our apartment? We’ll join you!”
Three days pass, in which we worked, visited the apartment to make sure no one fished our CDs from off the balcony, and checked to see how much drier the place was. Day 1 consisted of opening the door and hitting a wall of moisture rather like monsoon season, or an Atlanta spring. Day 2 was not so bad, but now you could smell it. Day 3 things were almost tolerable. Then came new years eve, so the carpet guys took the next two days off, even though they had delivered the new under pad and there was nothing stopping them from putting it in.
On January 2, we moved back in, moving furniture and getting an accumulation of kibble off of our beds. In a way, our experience was like a microcosm of nature itself. The flood waters had receded, which meant that spring was here: i.e. the smell of life pervaded the apartment, and things were growing everywhere.
Casualties of the flood (now that we've had a chance to really organise things) included the aforementioned Spidey 2099 comic, plus all my Alien Nation posters, and a 5 pound bag of sugar, which is now a solid rock. Our sanity having been sacrificed many years ago, was not a victim. The only thing which seems to have enjoyed the flood (aside from the building’s resident naïad) was Bruce’s plant Shrub-Niggurath, which thrived on the moist atmosphere and a steady diet of lone carpet cleaners.
It’s a month later and we still aren't sure why it happened, is it because the building’s pipes are getting old? is it because the renovated our kitchen just before we moved in and they did a shitty job of it. Perhaps the east tower’s community of Wiccans discovered that I lived here, and spent an evening chanting and dipping two red-headed ken-dolls into the toilet. It is interesting to point out that since we started leaving the lid off the cookie jar so that the local naïad could get at our candy, that we haven’t had any other problems involving the plumbing (unfortunately, the building’s elevator is now working in a decidedly non-euclidian fashion, and neither Bruce nor I know how to make an effective Elder Sign).
So now we sleep again in our own little apartment, safe in our knowledge that the kitchen sink will never explode again. We dream nice dreams, but keep an ear open for the tell-tale sounds of the bathroom sink leaking.
the end.
I was preparing for another brave day of computer sales at Office Depot… Many a brave CPU would be captured and sold to executives who would pay much to have such a prize displayed proudly on their desk.
Having finished performing the ritual of the 3S’s, I walked down the hallway of my apartment. About midway, my feet began to… squelch in the carpet.
Only a select few know the true feeling of squelching, it being more than just the sensation of stepping into something damp and clammy. Anyone who has walked on the beach and stepped into a patch of seaweed thinks they know, but they do not. No, the true feeling of squelchiness can only be achieved by stepping into something that not only will mess you up, but you know, on an almost psychic level, that it will go on messing you up for quite a while. On a scale of 1 to 10, stepping into cat vomit and feeling the residue squeeze into the pores of your sock is a 1. Hearing the land mine click from pressure as you step on it is a 10.
Feeling my carpet squelch was about a 3.
By this point, my socks were sopping wet, so I figured nothing else could go wrong. I moved to the kitchen to see what the hell had happened. Was it the refrigerator? had it become unplugged, necessitating our throwing away of at least $5 dollars worth of ketchup and (not so frozen) vegetables? Or was it the sink. Turns out it was the sink.
Tracing the sound of dribbling water, I looked under our sink, where we keep our tools and other non-perishable, but oh-so-rustable items. I quickly determined that the cold water intake pipe is leaking like a sieve. Being the clever, university-educated man that I am, I determined that turning off the water to this pipe would stop the source of the leak, after which I could call building maintenance, let them handle the problem while I went to work. So I turned off the pipe. It exploded.
Now most people when the hear the word “exploded” think of the special effects extravaganzas that we all grew up on. These involve fire and light and sparks and smoke. But water can explode too.
The pipe blew out of from behind the wall, causing an explosion of water directly into my face, causing much sputtering. I immediately tore off my work shirt and tried to jam it into the hole to stop the beginning flood. This proved ineffective (or as my id was whispering to me: “Fat lot of good this is doing”).
To truly appreciate the amount of water pouring, nay, blasting out of my wall, try to imagine having a bucket of water dumped on your head every second. Or just imagine your in the shower, but the water pressure is about triple what your used to, and it’s cold, and you have your clothing on, and your comic collection is on the floor twenty feet away, and there’s nothing you can do.
After two minutes of desperately trying to reattach the pipe, using a golf shirt as a substitute for soldiered copper pipe, I decided to alert my roommate Bruce, mostly because my hands were going numb from the cold, but also because misery loves company.
I sprinted down the hall (Squelchsquelchsquelch) thumped on his door and requested that he call building maintenance at his earliest convenience. I then ran back down the hall (Squelchsquelchsquelch) to once again do my imitation of the little Dutch boy.
Bruce dashed into the hall, whereupon he made two, almost simultaneous sounds. The first was “squelch”, then he said “Nyaigh” (if you are reading this story to someone, you owe it to them to put just the right emphasis on “Nyaigh”. Really warble it, with a quick inhale about midway through, like someone had just tossed a ice cube down the back of your shirt.).
Squelching down the hall, Bruce immediately called down to the apartment office to have them turn off the water. Now I wasn’t listening to their conversation, but I do know the person who answers the phone. Gently put, this lady is not encumbered with a vast intellect.
The train of events from her end proceed like so:
1) Bruce tells her that a torrent of water is blasting out into our kitchen and that it will reach biblical proportions within minutes.
2) Office Lady’s brain (using a virtual memory algorithm rejected by Microsoft as being too slow and too riddled with bugs) page faults.
3) Bruce emphasises that the first course of action should be to turn off the water at whatever source will stop the flow the fastest.
4) Office Lady’s brain makes a feeble attempt to comprehend what is going on, pages faults again, then does a selection sort on an unordered, linked-list of tenant problems. Stops at “sink is leaking”, which while true, lacks the urgency of our problem.
5) Office Lady says she will call the maintenance manager, then hangs up to do so.
At this point Bruce and I (I having abandoned my job as sacrificial victim to the buildings resident naïad) begin rescuing items on the floor of our apartment, because at this point their is an inch of water in the kitchen, and their is a visible line of sopping wet carpet against dry carpet, which is expanding away from the kitchen at a rate that gave us about a minute and a half before it reached the far wall. Bruce went for his Sports Illustrated, and electronic putting green. I went for my comic books (rescuing them I might add, the only casualty being Spiderman 2099 #40, which sucked anyway).
Meanwhile in the east tower, Office Lady is radioing the maintenance man (who later told us that he was about to shut off his radio and have a coffee break). “West 2008’s sink is leaking” she mooed.
After five minutes, Bruce and I had thrown everything that could be thrown, up onto every raised surface in the living room. We climbed on top of two couches to marvel at the geyser of water blasting out from under our sink. At this point the entire apartment was flooded except for the two bedrooms, which were a sort of high ground for the place. At this point we had achieved about a 6 on the squelch meter.
After ten minutes we hear the elevator reach our floor, Bruce wades over to the let the maintenance guy in. At this point the water in the public areas of our apartment was an inch above the carpet. The water had spread out the front door to about half way to the elevator shaft, a truly spectacular achievement when you consider we have a corner apartment at the very end of the hallway.
The maintenance guy saunters out of the elevator, turns towards our apartment and did his very best imitation of a ‘toon. His jaw dropped to his sternum and he “Woowoo”ed as good as Daffy Duck.
At this point the naïad of the apartment possessed his mind. He rushed into the apartment and dived into the torrent of water erupting from under our sink, replacing me as the god’s sacrificial victim.
That or he was trying to shut off the water as I had done. To his credit, it took him about a minute to realise how futile this was, whereas it had taken me about three minutes to realise this. Of course, I’m just a computer geek. Put him in front of a computer and see how long it takes him to debug code.
Our saviour then ran out to turn off the water. Five minutes later we could hear the water pressure start to drop. Five minutes after that it stopped entirely. He returned later with the carpet guys and the plumber. The plumber took 2 minutes to reset the pipe, the carpet guys took 2 hours soaking up all the water. They used two (2) wet vacs to suck up all this water, emptying one into the sink, and the other off our balcony (I should point out that our apartment is about 200 feet above 9th avenue… by the time the water hit the ground it had turned into snow).
We had to move everything in the apartment to one of three places: The far wall of my bedroom, the far wall of Bruce’s bedroom, and the balcony (The next day, me and my dad came with a huge orange tarp to cover up all the stuff on the balcony, this had the dual effect of protecting our living room furniture from the elements, and of identifying our apartment as unique for a six block radius… “Which apartment is yours James?”, “It’s that big orange one their on the third building past the CanOxy tower”). We moved everything while the carpet guys were soaking up our rug. “Will we be able to move all this stuff back in a few hours?” I (foolishly) asked. “Try a few days” says carpet guy #1.
While doing all this moving, Carpet Guy #1 says “It’s too bad your apartment had to flood today, we were booked solid with jobs, tomorrow would have been much more convenient”.
“Sorry”, Bruce said “We’ll try to book ahead for our next flood”.
By the time they were finished, all the public areas were empty, and they had set up these huge fans under the carpets (the carpet padding was torn out, being a lost cause. In much the same way trying to stem the flow of water with a golf shirt was a lost cause). When turned on the fans made the carpet undulate in a way that unpleasantly reminded me of a hot tub full of Shoggoths.
We made our escape, running back to mommy and daddy’s as fast as we could. As we were leaving, the carpet guys and the Maintenance Manager were methodically checking all the ‘08 apartments below us for flood damage (they were still finding it when they hit 908 apparently) Bruce and I figured that if an angry mob of torch wielding tenants came for our blood, we would point up and say “Are you going to get those bastards in 2108 who flooded our apartment? We’ll join you!”
Three days pass, in which we worked, visited the apartment to make sure no one fished our CDs from off the balcony, and checked to see how much drier the place was. Day 1 consisted of opening the door and hitting a wall of moisture rather like monsoon season, or an Atlanta spring. Day 2 was not so bad, but now you could smell it. Day 3 things were almost tolerable. Then came new years eve, so the carpet guys took the next two days off, even though they had delivered the new under pad and there was nothing stopping them from putting it in.
On January 2, we moved back in, moving furniture and getting an accumulation of kibble off of our beds. In a way, our experience was like a microcosm of nature itself. The flood waters had receded, which meant that spring was here: i.e. the smell of life pervaded the apartment, and things were growing everywhere.
Casualties of the flood (now that we've had a chance to really organise things) included the aforementioned Spidey 2099 comic, plus all my Alien Nation posters, and a 5 pound bag of sugar, which is now a solid rock. Our sanity having been sacrificed many years ago, was not a victim. The only thing which seems to have enjoyed the flood (aside from the building’s resident naïad) was Bruce’s plant Shrub-Niggurath, which thrived on the moist atmosphere and a steady diet of lone carpet cleaners.
It’s a month later and we still aren't sure why it happened, is it because the building’s pipes are getting old? is it because the renovated our kitchen just before we moved in and they did a shitty job of it. Perhaps the east tower’s community of Wiccans discovered that I lived here, and spent an evening chanting and dipping two red-headed ken-dolls into the toilet. It is interesting to point out that since we started leaving the lid off the cookie jar so that the local naïad could get at our candy, that we haven’t had any other problems involving the plumbing (unfortunately, the building’s elevator is now working in a decidedly non-euclidian fashion, and neither Bruce nor I know how to make an effective Elder Sign).
So now we sleep again in our own little apartment, safe in our knowledge that the kitchen sink will never explode again. We dream nice dreams, but keep an ear open for the tell-tale sounds of the bathroom sink leaking.
the end.
