With A Little Help From My Friends

[jamesq]

Today was a bit of a roller coaster day.

The drain next to my washing machine has been backing up recently. It acts up every couple of years and I have to get it cleaned. I called up Roto-Rooter, foolishly thinking that the biggest ad in the yellow pages meant the most competent people.

The Roto-Rooter guy came in this morning and tried to auger out the drain. He very quickly determined that there was something blocking the drain, and it wasn't very far up the pipe.

As an aside, this is why only the washing machine caused a backup and the toilets/showers didn't - they were past the blockage.

The guy sent a camera down the hole and quickly saw that there was some... thing in the pipe. Could be a child's toy. Could be a tool. Don't know. It was also encased in sludge. He pulls back the camera and shows me some of the sludge. "This is dirt", he says, "That means your drain has collapsed. Nothing I can do about that, you'll have to call my boss."

I thank him for his time and pay the $200 it costs for him to stick a camera down my drain. I then call his boss, who tells me that he'll be by in an hour. An hour passes and he shows up. He too sticks a camera down my drain and sees the same blockage. Next he puts a transmitter in to determine exactly where it is in relationship to the rest of the basement. Naturally the blockage is under my furnace.

Bossman says "yeah, your pipe has collapsed around the thing. The only way to fix it is to dig up your basement and pull that section of drain pipe out and replace it. It'll cost in the neighborhood of $3500."

"Fuck", says I.

While this is going on I wrote the earlier blog entry. I'm pissed off but resigned to spending a boatload of cash and being supremely inconvenienced for several days. But what else can I do. The problem is I'm a professional that is well paid for competence and honesty in my craft. I assume that other people are too.

Then i get a really good piece of advice from sagaciouslu - Call Beothuk. At no point did it occure to me that I should - Beothuk is in the SCA/Friend categories in my mind, not the professional category, despite the fact that he does this sort of stuff for a living and does it for a company with somewhat higher cachet then Roto-Rooter.

'Thuk was more then willing to come by after work. This was definitely something I wanted a trusted second opinion on. Good thing too as it turned out. More on that in a bit.

While this was going on, I also had hislittlekitty come over to clean up my place. Basically, the dirt (and the drain flooding) had finally gotten past what I could get done. The place was getting filthier every day despite my best efforts. It really needed someone to roll up their sleeves and make a sustained effort to do all the grunt work I hate doing.

I had money but no time. hislittlekitty had plenty of time and was willing to take my money. She came by and cleaned the hell out of my house. The floors are cleaned, the dust buffalos (they're a little big to be called dust bunnies) were vanquished, the large mound of recycling was removed to the garage. It took her nearly 7 hours.

I gave her a ride home then rushed back to meet Beothuk. 'Thuk, it turns out, has access to much better equipment then the Roto-Rooter guys. Better cameras, better augers - he really knew how to use them.

So what was in my drain? One of these:

... Not sure how the hell it got in there since I've never owned one. My hypothesis is that it was a piece of the old furnace I had had replaced last year and the workmen had accidentally kicked it into the drain.

"So I don't need to have my basement floor dug up", I asked.
"Not if I can help it", said Beothuk.

And he proceeded to work that drain like a rented mule for the next two hours (with a break with Wilma and Morrigan to discuss SCA business). He switched bits on the auger. Torqued the hell out of it and poked it with his own camera. Sometimes the thing would move slightly. Other times it would move a foot or a meter. Finally, he poked it from a 3" pipe to a 4" pipe and zoom, off it went into the distance (and ultimately the city's 8" and larger pipes, where it shouldn't trouble anyone).

So what was going through the Roto-Rooter guys minds? I'm tempted to think they were trying to gouge me, but I think that was just a fortuitous (for them) coincidence. What really happened (I think) is they looked at the chunk of plastic and thought "This is going to be hard as hell to clear". Given the equipment they had, it would have probably busted their tools (their auger was way thinner and weaker then Beothuk's monster). I think the original guy and bossman simply wanted no part of trying to work that piece loose.

Beothuk was made of tougher stuff though and he managed to clean out the pipe. He also managed to clean all the crud off the pipe walls too. End result being my drain has a clean bill of health.

So sagaciouslu, thanks for the reminder that I have competent friends. hislittlekitty, thanks for cleaning up my sty. Beothuk, thanks for rescuing me from a savage anal raping at the hands of Roto-Rooter.

I will sleep the sleep of the supremely relieved tonight.

Comments

[sagaciouslu.livejournal.com]

Yay! As I said to teh Bunneh, they don't call me sagaciouslu for any reason other than that's how I refer to myself. For some reason.

[jamesq]

Funny thing is, if we call you scott we get the wrong guy.

[ladyerwyn.livejournal.com]

I had a dream that I went to a party you had, but you lived in Ohio, had long curly black hair, were short and played in a rock band. You had no idea who I was and everybody was not very nice to me and after a while you asked me to leave. Right before I left I told you it was me and you remembered. It was weird.

Anyway, good luck on that pipe. You should call roto-rooter and bitch them out, or send a letter to corporate.

[jamesq]

That wasn't me.

I did send them an email nasty gram. Not expecting a reply. Plus, one of their guys left a wrench behind. He's not getting it back because I want to have some kind of petty, passive-aggressive, revenge.

[jamesq]

As a Canadian I did, in fact, send them a strongly worded letter.

[hislittlekitty.livejournal.com]

The thing they removed from the pipe looks remarkably like a splitter for a garden hose.

That being said, I watch Holmes on Homes and when they opens things up they find building scraps and all sorts of shit that doesn't belong, often in brand new houses.

[oblivions.livejournal.com]

It is a hose splitter, a cheapy residential one if it looks like the picture.

While Holms on Homes worries me a more than a little at times, I can't argue with the shit that gets left for some lucky plebe to find. I've a few stories; some benign and amusing and others far from of stuff found after the fact...

[jamesq]

You're both right. The only difference between the two is that the one in the picture was green and the one in my drain was yellow. and in the wrong place.

Thing is, I've had the drain cleaned before and there wasn't anything in it before. It pretty much had to have gotten in there in the last year and the only time anything like that would have happened was when I had my furnace replaced.

'Thuk also said that it shouldn't have been that far down the drain - it should have been in the trap. To be farther, someone would have had to have pushed it there.

I'm starting to think that the first competent worker in my basement was Beothuk.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_thwap_/]

I would tend to agree on the competent worker comment..

[othelianna.livejournal.com]

Yaaaay!

I love when friends help friends. It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. (Since I pretty much only see 'Thuk at SCA related things, I have a mental image of him in garb, complete with pointy hat, shoving cameras into your pipes.)