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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Michael Sphar who wrote (10784)	5/26/1998 1:54:00 PM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71178

Speaking of ten-foot poles... Friday we had a plumber come over to snake out a plugged drain line. The kitchen sink and the garage washbasin drained into each other, but the pipe leading to the main drain was plugged solid. A whole bottle of Liquid-Napalm didn't budge it. So the fellow came over to snake it. I didn't let him talk me into the $200 whiz-bang hydro-spray supersnake. Citing fiduciary exigencies (like, we're pretty broke, Dude) I stuch with the $95 regular mechanical snake. Moving right along, Fellow undoes two of the three cleanout caps protruding below our kitchen. He runs the snake into the left one and listens in the right one. Has me flush the toilet once in a while. Well, he runs the whole hundred feet of snake in, with no change in how the other cleanout sounds. With a shrug, he starts to bring the snake back in. Big rotary drum affair with a footswitch. He gets maybe half of it bach, when the sucker binds up solid. No amount of twisting or pulling in any of the four available axes will unbind this puppy. I'll cut out the long upsetting negotiations with Fellow, Second Fellow Called In to Help, Third Fellow..., and Manager on Phone, who was a complete bunghole. I was not helped by my vioce. Ordinarily possessed of a creamy baritone which makes Sinatra sound like Cat Stevens, I was reduced to make sounds which rather resembled an idling leafblower. Bottom line - I tell Assembled Plumbing Professionals that they had a choice - either retrieve their tool at no extra charge, or abandon it in place. The get on the horn with the Lesser Demon, then come back and say "okay, we finish". To do so, they had to get under the house. Access is through a smallish trapdoor in a closet in the far back of the master bedroom. We pulled out a ton of crates&stuff. Uniformed professionals disappear into uor own little pocket purgatory, and with three hours of serious banging& cussing in some Indo-Pacific tongue drifting thru the floorboards, the boys go to work. They finally got their tool free, and I'm trusting their word that they replaced the cut-out section of drainpipe. The snake's head was solidly wrapped in what I first took to be a yuck-soaked towel. But it turned out to be a heroic wad of dental floss made into a "composite material" with all the other stuff that goes down toilets and kitchen sinks. It smelled bad. Our drains run free and clear now. All our used dental floss now ends up in the trash. I felt sorta bad for suggesting to the two fellows that the stuckness of their snake in <mypipes was somehow a demonstration of professional laxity. So, once they were reborn from the Dark Place underneath our floors and had restored order within their cheerily-logo'd vans, I tipped them each with a bottle of better-grade scotch. With an invocation to keep this from the Lesser Demon.