A Mess For The Ages

Perhaps I spoke too soon about Project BS being completely back online. As of this post, I'm still getting sporadic reports of inaccessability, which is making me angry. And when I get angry, I tend to rend my garments and take to the jungle...

... Actually, as it turns out, this was one of those days where I should have just stayed in bed:

A tap on my door stirred me from my blissful meditation. I glanced at the clock. 9 AM. A good two hours before I wanted to wake up.

If it hadn't been for that aggravating PPIC assignment, I thought, I could've made some kind of new sleeping record tonight..

The knock grew more persistent, so I fumbled around with the nearest pair of pants in the dark and answered the door, bleary-eyed and hair all asunder. It was my roommate, Bobby.

"Bret, where's the drain outside the door here? 'Cause it's about to flood the basement."

Ah, perfect. One of the perils of living at a place like Wesley is that our basement - which just happens to hold all the bedrooms - is below ground. It's below ground and above an underground river, I'm told. Anytime it rains for more than a day or two, we're always in for a spin of the Flood Roulette Wheel to see what kind of problem we'll get next.

Bobby and I narrowly avoided drain spillage from outside by unclogging all the leaves that were covering up the drainpipe. I felt pretty successful, and I vowed to reward myself by washing my hands and going back to bed. I strolled on into my bathroom, flipped on the light, and was startled to see that the laws of physics had apparently stopped working, causing water to flow up out of my shower drain. A nice shower-load of water was standing in my bathroom, on the cusp of pouring out into the floor.

"The laws of gravity don't work here anymore!" I said to Bobby.

"We must have been sucked into an alternate dimension where everything's turned upside down," he replied. How could either of us argue with that logic?

My first instinct was to grab the ShopVac, but since we only have the diminuitive 0.25 gallon version, I was causing more splashes than dryness as I ran back and forth trying to empty the container before the shower filled up again.

Then, I remembered the Emergency Sump Pumps (TM). Those beautiful blue cylinders of pumping power. The ones that saved Steve's room from flooding a couple of years ago! After a little bit of a search for a proper hose, I had Mr. Sump (as I thought about affectionately calling him) sitting in my shower, draining all the murky water of questionable content out into my window drain. Problem solved, for the most part, until Bobby and I had to mop up the other sewer line covers that were bubbling up elsewhere on the basement floor. Brilliant!