Tuesday, May 11, 2004

Excrement deleted

Last night was shit. Literally.

There was a thunderstorm. Thunderstorms are good (not shit) I like them, but it seems that out where I live (which is the other side of a mountain range from where I work) the storm had been going all day.

Lots of water + tiny drains + house at bottom of hill...

I got home (having had a fab drive through the mountains in the thunderstorm) to find my house smelled of poo... and there was sewage coming in through the back door. Bad.

I opened the back door and discovered that a) my back yard was ankle deep in sewage and b) the dodgy drainpipe that Mr. Gap-toothed-maniac esq. figured would be a good way of removing waste water from my house (it is not, but that's par for the course with his ideas... more on that another time) was sagging off the wall... oh and at this point the heavens were still open so biblical quantities of water were still falling from on high.

I called the insurance company.

About two hours later (the rain had by now stopped) a very nice man arrived and started puzzling out the origins of the sewage - we discovered that it wasn't coming (as I'd assumed) from my partially collapsed drains at all (they're still water tight, they just don't look it) it was actually coming from the rest of the village ("great" I thought, "not only am I standing ankle deep in crap but it's other people's!")

About four hours after that I'd managed to clean the inside of the house and this morning I stayed home to clear the yard. I'm hoping to get a plumber out to quote on some work that should a) replace the stoopid Gap-toothed-maniac drainage with something stable and sane, and b) ensure that the next time the storm drains surcharge there's no way for it to get into my house!

footnote: I made it into work this afternoon to find amongst other things that the delightful Sixth Year had broken a stink bomb onto my desk as a going away present (their exam leave starts tomorrow: 'rah!) and I can't help feeling smug that for starters I wasn't here so they only stank out themselves, but better still it pales into insignificance in comparison to the stench I've been dealing with the past 24 hours! hah, take that stupid wormbabies.

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