I’ve often referred jokingly to my story ‘Conversation with a mechanical horse’ as ‘The adventures of Barno and the puddle of piss’. After last week and weekend, I shall cease to do so. Truth is obviously much grosser than fiction (though Barno himself does not feature in this tale…)

I’m not much of a morning person, as people who’ve experienced me shortly after waking will agree. Alarm clocks annoy me, noise gets me grumpy, and early morning phone calls throw my whole day out of whack. So imagine the effect on me when at 7:30am on Thursday morning, I stepped into our bathroom for a drink of water, but found a lake of piss and excrement instead. It seemed our sewer pipes were clogged, and unfortunately our sewer pipes also transport waste from the seven apartments above ours. It took me a record-breaking two minutes of early morning processing power to realize that the yellow fluid lapping against my toes had been produced that night by my neighbors’ kidneys, and the turds floating around were the remains of their meals.

The building janitor was only a phone call away, and at 9:15 the emergency plumber reported for duty. This smelly, beer-gutted, ass-cracked gentleman proceeded to remove our toilet boil, and attempted to shove 10 feet of steel coil into the resulting hole in the wall.

The coil – apparently a standard piece of plumbing equipment – got stuck only 7 feet into the tubes. Disregarding our request to check out the problem by camera, the plumber put more and more force and violence behind his attempts, asking me to have water running in the bathroom so he could see if the drainage improved.

Gallons of water later, the plumber hastily fled the scene in a rush of badly hidden guilt. In retrospect, it is clear that he’d drawn the only obvious conclusion from the tsunami of tapwater that was suddenly flooding our wooden hallway floor: he’d been pushing and banging away not at a mysterious and indestructible obstruction in the sewer pipes, but against our very destructible bathroom drain pipes. Did I say ‘destructible’? I meant ‘destroyed’. In his eagerness to solve our problem, he’d completely demolished the three pipes that drain our washing machine, bathroom sink and shower stall. And the water he’d kept running had flooded our brand new wooden floor.

Not all the water though; most of it went through the floor, which also happens to be our downstairs neighbor’s ceiling.

This is only the beginning of a long story of disaster and incompetence. Suffice it to say that after five whole days, the damage was repaired and the sewer unclogged (among other things by extracting not one, but two dishcloths that have strangely enough not been claimed yet by any of our upstairs neighbors).

PS: The upside is that we’re now forced, by the huge hole in the wall behind the shower stall, to redo our bathroom much sooner than we planned. And our design includes a bath!!