For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women, please visit www.shyperson.com. For Terry Heggy's other writing, please see www.terryheggy.com.

How Did THAT Get in My Tub? ~1990

I like mornings. If I don’t have a morning swim practice to attend, I’ll still get up and take my time fixing breakfast, reading the paper, etc. before it’s time to go to work. I would hate to be one of those folks who frantically have to scramble to do all their morning chores within the 15 minutes between when they awaken and when they’re supposed to be at work.

One morning, though, I ended up having to spend a little bit of time on an unplanned activity.

I lived on the bottom floor of the apartment complex. I hadn’t lived there long, so I didn’t know any of my neighbors.

-- OK, it doesn’t matter how long I’d lived there…I’m a socially-challenged introvert, and probably would not have met them ever, unless they dropped by sometime to ask me to turn down the Ted Nugent records I was playing. (C’mon, you try listening to “The Great White Buffalo” at low volume – it just ain’t right.)

Anyway, as I prepared to take my morning shower, I noticed that there was already water in the tub. “Hmm,” I thought, “isn’t that peculiar?” I checked the position of the drain handle – seemed to be in the correct position. The bathtub spout was not dripping. By everything I knew about the science of plumbing, the tub should have been draining. It should have been empty.

But as I watched, I noticed that the water level seemed to be rising. “That’s odd,” I thought. “I must consider this phenomenon whilst I go to retrieve the morning paper.”

A few minutes later, the water level had risen dangerously high. “My goodness,” I thought to myself, “If it fills up much more, it could run over onto the bathroom floor. What should I do?”

I went into the kitchen closet and got the bucket I intended to use if I ever decided to mop the linoleum (which was about as likely as winning Lotto a dozen times in a row). I filled the bucket by dipping it in the tub, and then strolled outside to dump the water into the apartment’s garden. “Not bad,” I thought. “I’ll be able to empty the tub, and water the plants at the same time. It’s a win-win situation.”

After about two more buckets-full, it became apparent that the tub was filling faster than my one-man bucket brigade could dump out. Looking around frantically, I noticed my laundry basket. For some reason, when I had gone shopping for apartment fixin’s, the solid-sided Rubbermaid containers were on sale for less than the flimsy criss-crossed ones, so I had bought the one that turned out to be leak proof. My current little bathtub emergency made it clear that I had made a wise purchasing decision.

I dumped my dirty clothes onto the bed, grabbed the tub and headed for the bathroom. Shortly thereafter, I was frantically running to and from the apartment, carrying a full liquid load, and worry about the poor drowning garden plants on the way back in. As more people in the apartment complex were waking up and doing their morning business, it became apparent that a good portion of whatever went down their drains was surfacing up through mine.

I will spare you a description of the mixture that was filling my tub, but it was indeed a foul batch of stuff. I did NOT want it running onto the floor of my apartment. After a couple of particularly athletic trips to the garden, I had gained a small advantage on the growing flood – so I took time to start making phone calls.

The apartment managers weren’t on duty yet, of course. And the recording on the maintenance “emergency” line assured me that someone would call back “as soon as possible”. I also called Roto-Rooter, just in case the apartment staff didn’t call back in time. Of course, these calls were sandwiched in between my dip n’ fill/dump and run round trips to the garden.

My arms were starting to get tired. Even though I was an athlete in the prime of youth, it’s still a challenge to even pick up a full-sized laundry basket full of, uh, “liquid”, much less running frantically up the steps from the garden level and out to a spot far enough away from the apartment that I wouldn’t have to smell it. A new strategy was called for.

I started yelling at the doors of my neighbors as I went up the steps, and of course, my clomping alone was creating a pretty decent racket. After a couple such screaming and clomping trips, one of the other apartment doors opened, and a sleepy-eyed young lady peeked out. “Man, you gotta help me…” I pleaded. “We’ve got a bit of an emergency here.”

Thank goodness that she was able to overlook the fact that I was a half-dressed and wild-eyed maniac with a bucketful of sewage. She ducked back into her apartment, hastily pulled on a bathrobe, and then accompanied me on my next circuit, which gave me a chance to explain.

Within minutes, she had pounded on every door in the complex and had told people to stop their showers, quit flushing their toilets, and refrain from brushing their teeth. At about that time, the emergency maintenance guy returned my call, and promised to “zip over” in a heartbeat.

It was nice to know that most of the neighbors had the courtesy to respect the “no drainage” request, at least for a little while. But everyone was up by now, and there were some who felt that their biological and employment-oriented needs outweighed the needs of the aching-armed nerd from the garden level. My tub’s fill rate decreased, but did not stop. I continued to haul sludge while my neighbor continued to place frantic phone calls.

The maintenance guy finally showed up and diagnosed the problem as “a clog somewhere”. He said he’d go get some tools and be back in about 15 minutes. “NO!” I shouted. “Before you go anywhere, you need to turn off all the water in the building. NOW!”

He made the “I didn’t think of that” face, and then nodded agreement. Within minutes, the water was shut off, and with nothing to fill toilets or to come out of faucets, people stopped contributing to my problem. A couple more trips with the laundry bucket, and I could finally take a rest break.

Shortly thereafter, the Roto-Rooter guy showed up and worked his magic. When asked what the problem had been, he simply responded “roots” (which I guess is to be expected from a Roto-Rooter guy).

The drains were running freely, and the water supply was restored within a very short period. All was well again.

EPILOG

As far as I know, everyone in the building was still able to perform their morning ablutions and to make it to where they were going without being too late. The management hired a crew to come in and clean my bathroom thoroughly, though it still smelled a bit for the next couple of weeks. Sadly, my workhorse of a laundry basket was unable to recover – but instead got a hero’s sendoff and was lovingly consigned to the nearest dumpster. My helpful neighbor and I began saying “hi” when we saw each other in the hallways. After a while, I even got up the courage to ask her for a date, but she declined, saying that the memories were simply too much to overcome. Sigh.

When my lease ran out, I decided to move to the complex across the street. Those adventures are described elsewhere.

For info on the Shy Man's Guide to Success with Women, please visit www.shyperson.com. For Terry Heggy's other writing, please see www.terryheggy.com.

The Bargain Apartment Phone ~1990

Whenever I’ve lived alone in an apartment, I’ve chosen the “Garden Level”. It’s cheaper, there are generally fewer steps to negotiate, and it’s tougher for the Commies to beam microwaves at you from space when you’re shielded by the floors above.

Oh sure, the people above can be annoying with all their tromping around in lead snowshoes, and with their 3am Barry Manilow karaoke – but you’re gonna hear noises from neighbors if you’re on the top floor, too. Might as well save the extra few bucks each month. You can always sleep with earplugs, or wear your stereo headphones to bed. (If I’m in the mood for soothing sleep music, it’ll be Blood Sweat & Tears, or maybe Alice Cooper. If I want text, it’ll be Frank Zane’s dihoctic motivation tapes.)

Anyway, most of my bottom floor experiences have been mostly pleasant and non-traumatic. I did have one cross-the-hall neighbor who dealt drugs, and had all sorts of unsavory characters calling upon him at all hours of the night. One day, I had just installed a used portable phone that I’d bought at a garage sale from my buddy Harp. He charged me $10 for it, which seemed like a good deal at the time – cordless phone technology was in its infancy, and such luxurious devices were pretty pricey. Anyway, when I came home from a quick trip to the store, I was not surprised to see a couple of uniformed police officers standing by the apartment door.

“Good!” I thought, “They’ve finally come to arrest the drug dealer.” But, no, as it turned out, they were here to see ME.

Thankfully, it was not to arrest me for having accidentally “forgotten” to return the Martin Marietta stapler that had somehow made its way home from work with me one day. And it was not to harass me about my connection with radical Lyndon LaRouche supporters that I had inadvertently chatted with one day at the airport.

It was because the piece of crap phone that Harp had sold me had spontaneously dialed “911” while I was out. Since there was no voice on the line, the dispatcher had immediately scrambled a team of officers to discover the problem.

It took a few minutes to straighten out the situation. The officers went into my apartment first, perhaps expecting to find the remains of a victim I’d mutilated before running off to King Soopers to buy my gallon of milk and 10-pack of Top Ramen. They apparently thought that I had not finished the job before I left, and the poor hacked-up creature I had left behind had somehow found the strength to dial 911 before they expired.

But, no. The apartment was clean. (Well, clean in the sense of not being the scene of a violent crime – certainly not clean by the Felix Unger definition.) But over in the corner of the room, the renegade telephone was happily clicking away, dialing who knows what numbers. For all I knew, it was scheduling appointments for carpet cleaning, enrolling me in the “Cheese of the Month” club, and making donations to Greenpeace…with only an occasional emergency call to the cops.

Anyway, after a brief investigation, the extremely polite officers simply suggested that maybe I ought to discontinue using that particular telephone device. They watched as I unplugged it, but left before I took a hammer to it and mashed it into a zillion shards.

Final footnote: Though the cops didn’t seem very interested in my assertion that my neighbor was a felon, they did quietly listen to what I had to say. A few days later, I noticed that the apartment across the hall was now empty, and I never saw the guy again. Whether he was taken away, or simply decided to move to Sheboygin, I never did find out. But I did start sleeping better.