Sunday, September 11, 2005
Flood Waters
One thing that made OPNETWORK worse than it had to be was the fact that we had a minor flood in my house during the annual event, which was a couple weeks ago. I had never experienced the pleasure of flooding, but boy, was it a joy.
OPNETWORK is a grind. It's a week-long user conference that we put on for free for all of our customers. The entire company essentially shuts down for a month to put it on. Honestly, in the long run it's worth it to the company, but that doesn't make it any more fun to go through. For the few weeks before the actual event, we're all preparing classes and presentations. I swear, I've created more PowerPoint slides for OPNETWORK than I care to admit. Frankly, it's mind-numbing. We're also fixing up all the software, preparing demos and fixing bugs, since we usually try to release something interesting during or right after the conference.
The weekend before, we're downtown at the conference site (The Reagan Center) for approximately 20-30 hours. Then, during the conference, we have to get up early (7:30-8, which is not a big deal unless you normally get up at 10, like I do), and stay until at least 6, but often longer. Furthermore, I had to give a couple presentations, including a 4-hour class on Monday. I knew what I was doing, but it sure was draining talking for 4 hours straight.
So, it was within that context that I came home on Tuesday completely drained. I had actually played softball at 8 and 9 PM on Monday, after a weekend of moving computers around and setting things up, as well as getting little sleep and being on my feet the whole day. Yeah, I'm old and crusty. I decided to do something I never do: Take a bath. I know it sounds girly. Tough. I was sore and tired. I figured I'd read a book in the bathtub. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
I head up and fill the bath around 10pm. At about 10:10, Sam knocks on the door. She tells me that she thinks the basement is flooding. I tell her that it's probably just something simple, like maybe she had left a washcloth in the basement sink while running the washing machine. She leaves, but then 5 minutes later comes back and says the water's rising. I figure this is not likely to go away by ignoring it, so I finish up my aborted (and none-too-relaxing) bath and run downstairs.
Sure enough, the basement's flooding. The drain in the basement supply closet floor is overflowing. The water doesn't look like sewer water, which is nice. In fact, as we step in it, we notice that it's warm. We realize that it's my bath water. Hmmm...this is strange.
At this point, I wasn't sure what to do. I had never really had to deal with plumbing problems more complicated than a stopped shower drain. (And, in fact, we had had that problem a couple weeks prior, and I had simply Drano-ed it out...but clearly the problem was bigger than we thought.) I figured the first step was probable to get rid of the water. Not yet owning a Shop-Vac, Sam and I picked up dustpans and started bailing water into pails. To be honest, the water wasn't that high, but it was spreading over much of the basement, and that didn't seem like a good thing.
We started bailing, and when I had a full bucket, I dumped it into the basement sink. Bad move. The water came right back up the floor drain. Ok, what next? Well, I bailed another bucket full, and this time, dumped it out back, where there was another drain. Surely, an outdoor drain wouldn't flow back into the house, right? That would be absurd. Well, welcome to absurd-land. That water came back up as well, although with the added bonus of the dirt and grass that was outside around the drain. Nice.
At this point (11 pm, mind you), we were out of options. We didn't really want to leave the water there overnight, and also be unable to run any water without exacerbating the problem. First, I called the Washington Sewer and Sanitary Commission, and described the problem. They told me it was a plumbing problem, and who was I to disagree. I looked up a 24-hour plumbing service, and called one. They told me that there would be a 130 dollar emergency fee if they sent someone out within the hour, and likely a 40 dollar charge for snaking the drain. At the time, it sounded like a deal to me.
They dispatched the plumber, and he showed up in about half an hour. He was a friendly fellow, considerate enough to put little plastic booties on over his shoes so as not to track water over the entire house. He asked a couple of questions, and within about five minutes he determined that it was a problem with the main drain form the house to the city's water lines. He said that the only solution in a house like ours (50 years old) was to snake it. And that was gonna cost money, because the only way to snake it properly was to pull up a toilet.
He looked in his little book, and adding in the emergency fees, the total cost was going to be 966 dollars. I was stunned! But I also didn't feel like I had a choice. I could have him come tomorrow morning for a couple hundred dollars less (because it wouldn't be the emergency rate), but given that it was OPNETWORK, I didn't quite have the time. Plus, he was already there. And it wasn't work that we could do ourselves, because we didn't own an industrial plumber's snake. (Although, I have to admit that I wondered how much one might cost.) We decided to bite the bullet and get it done. We didn't want the water sitting there overnight, and we didn't want to lose access to our water. Furthermore, we figured it would have to be done sooner or later anyways, and we knew the company was respectable.
So, our plumber went to work. He brought his snake in, and went to town. We tried to get other stuff done while he worked for about an hour. He pulled up the toilet, and ended up having to use about 45 feet of snake. In the end, he never found anything clogging the drain that he was able to pull back up, which was kind of frustrating. Still, he said he definitely detected a clog, but that it was actually in the drain, all the way out of the house. He guessed that it was something that had actually been there for months, and had just built up and built up until the drain was completely blocked.
In order to verify that the drain was working, we ran all the faucets in the house for what seemed like 15 minutes. I can only imagine what that did to our water bill. But it seemed to be draining, so we were happy that the problem was fixed. The plumber replaced the toilet, cleaned all of the walls and fixtures, and even gave us some complementary drain cleaner that we were supposed to use for preventative maintenance.
After all of that, we were left to bail water out of the basement. We spent the rest of the evening (there wasn't a whole lot of evening left, to be honest), bailing water with dustpans. Then, we moved all of the cardboard boxes that full of magazines that had been soaked through. The next day, we bought a couple mops and cleaned the entire basement.
Can you believe we only paid 966 dollars for the privilege of experiencing that much fun? I tell ya, we got quite a deal. Ah, the joys of homeownership. They pale compared to the fun of OPNETWORK.
OPNETWORK is a grind. It's a week-long user conference that we put on for free for all of our customers. The entire company essentially shuts down for a month to put it on. Honestly, in the long run it's worth it to the company, but that doesn't make it any more fun to go through. For the few weeks before the actual event, we're all preparing classes and presentations. I swear, I've created more PowerPoint slides for OPNETWORK than I care to admit. Frankly, it's mind-numbing. We're also fixing up all the software, preparing demos and fixing bugs, since we usually try to release something interesting during or right after the conference.
The weekend before, we're downtown at the conference site (The Reagan Center) for approximately 20-30 hours. Then, during the conference, we have to get up early (7:30-8, which is not a big deal unless you normally get up at 10, like I do), and stay until at least 6, but often longer. Furthermore, I had to give a couple presentations, including a 4-hour class on Monday. I knew what I was doing, but it sure was draining talking for 4 hours straight.
So, it was within that context that I came home on Tuesday completely drained. I had actually played softball at 8 and 9 PM on Monday, after a weekend of moving computers around and setting things up, as well as getting little sleep and being on my feet the whole day. Yeah, I'm old and crusty. I decided to do something I never do: Take a bath. I know it sounds girly. Tough. I was sore and tired. I figured I'd read a book in the bathtub. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
I head up and fill the bath around 10pm. At about 10:10, Sam knocks on the door. She tells me that she thinks the basement is flooding. I tell her that it's probably just something simple, like maybe she had left a washcloth in the basement sink while running the washing machine. She leaves, but then 5 minutes later comes back and says the water's rising. I figure this is not likely to go away by ignoring it, so I finish up my aborted (and none-too-relaxing) bath and run downstairs.
Sure enough, the basement's flooding. The drain in the basement supply closet floor is overflowing. The water doesn't look like sewer water, which is nice. In fact, as we step in it, we notice that it's warm. We realize that it's my bath water. Hmmm...this is strange.
At this point, I wasn't sure what to do. I had never really had to deal with plumbing problems more complicated than a stopped shower drain. (And, in fact, we had had that problem a couple weeks prior, and I had simply Drano-ed it out...but clearly the problem was bigger than we thought.) I figured the first step was probable to get rid of the water. Not yet owning a Shop-Vac, Sam and I picked up dustpans and started bailing water into pails. To be honest, the water wasn't that high, but it was spreading over much of the basement, and that didn't seem like a good thing.
We started bailing, and when I had a full bucket, I dumped it into the basement sink. Bad move. The water came right back up the floor drain. Ok, what next? Well, I bailed another bucket full, and this time, dumped it out back, where there was another drain. Surely, an outdoor drain wouldn't flow back into the house, right? That would be absurd. Well, welcome to absurd-land. That water came back up as well, although with the added bonus of the dirt and grass that was outside around the drain. Nice.
At this point (11 pm, mind you), we were out of options. We didn't really want to leave the water there overnight, and also be unable to run any water without exacerbating the problem. First, I called the Washington Sewer and Sanitary Commission, and described the problem. They told me it was a plumbing problem, and who was I to disagree. I looked up a 24-hour plumbing service, and called one. They told me that there would be a 130 dollar emergency fee if they sent someone out within the hour, and likely a 40 dollar charge for snaking the drain. At the time, it sounded like a deal to me.
They dispatched the plumber, and he showed up in about half an hour. He was a friendly fellow, considerate enough to put little plastic booties on over his shoes so as not to track water over the entire house. He asked a couple of questions, and within about five minutes he determined that it was a problem with the main drain form the house to the city's water lines. He said that the only solution in a house like ours (50 years old) was to snake it. And that was gonna cost money, because the only way to snake it properly was to pull up a toilet.
He looked in his little book, and adding in the emergency fees, the total cost was going to be 966 dollars. I was stunned! But I also didn't feel like I had a choice. I could have him come tomorrow morning for a couple hundred dollars less (because it wouldn't be the emergency rate), but given that it was OPNETWORK, I didn't quite have the time. Plus, he was already there. And it wasn't work that we could do ourselves, because we didn't own an industrial plumber's snake. (Although, I have to admit that I wondered how much one might cost.) We decided to bite the bullet and get it done. We didn't want the water sitting there overnight, and we didn't want to lose access to our water. Furthermore, we figured it would have to be done sooner or later anyways, and we knew the company was respectable.
So, our plumber went to work. He brought his snake in, and went to town. We tried to get other stuff done while he worked for about an hour. He pulled up the toilet, and ended up having to use about 45 feet of snake. In the end, he never found anything clogging the drain that he was able to pull back up, which was kind of frustrating. Still, he said he definitely detected a clog, but that it was actually in the drain, all the way out of the house. He guessed that it was something that had actually been there for months, and had just built up and built up until the drain was completely blocked.
In order to verify that the drain was working, we ran all the faucets in the house for what seemed like 15 minutes. I can only imagine what that did to our water bill. But it seemed to be draining, so we were happy that the problem was fixed. The plumber replaced the toilet, cleaned all of the walls and fixtures, and even gave us some complementary drain cleaner that we were supposed to use for preventative maintenance.
After all of that, we were left to bail water out of the basement. We spent the rest of the evening (there wasn't a whole lot of evening left, to be honest), bailing water with dustpans. Then, we moved all of the cardboard boxes that full of magazines that had been soaked through. The next day, we bought a couple mops and cleaned the entire basement.
Can you believe we only paid 966 dollars for the privilege of experiencing that much fun? I tell ya, we got quite a deal. Ah, the joys of homeownership. They pale compared to the fun of OPNETWORK.
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