Guest Column: Surviving the frustration of the plumbing season

For everything, they say, there is a season. A time to weep and a time to laugh, etc. The season your household doesn’t want to experience, however, is to have a blocked drain between Christmas and New Year. As you can tell, I speak in the season for bitterness. It started with a phone call to a plumber after Christmas Day and being told the next appointments were being scheduled in six days. I managed to whittle that down to three but the time passed in a mixture of frustration, inconvenience and self-pity.

When the plumbing season arrived at last, so did the plumber and he was reassuring. “Don’t worry, Mr. Green, I’m going to take care of you.”

But the snake he had wasn’t long enough and whatever extra help was needed wouldn’t be available until after the weekend. More frustration, increased pain and unprecedented self-pity.

When the new snake arrived, it was long enough but was coming up against an obstacle too stubborn for it to deal with. The new diagnosis: things were worse than expected. In fact, things were much worse than expected. “We may have to dig up your driveway,” they warned. I foresaw weeks more of bathing in teaspoonfuls of water.

Eventually a whole team arrived with a snake attached to a camera — a marvelous leap of technology, being able to see what Harry Lime had to go into the sewers of Vienna in person to see — and a drill with teeth like Tyrannosaurus Rex. The pictures were fascinating but daunting: thick tree roots, an underwater jungle. “Don’t worry, Mr. Green, we’re going (to) take care of you,” they said. For more authoritative comfort, my thoughts went back to Ecclesiastes: “There is a season to plant and a season to uproot.”

An hour later the team leader came back. “I have some good news,” he said. “We can see where the blockage is.”

But if some good news comes, can much bigger bad news be far behind?

“The blockage is just where your pipe meets the main drain. So, if we can’t drill it out, the county will have to dig up the street.”

“How much will that cost?”

“Poof,” he sighed, his shrug and outstretched hands suggesting it could be in the millions. “But we’re going to try to take care of you.”

Going to try. I went indoors and checked how much money was in my IRA.

An hour more and, miraculously, it was done. The drill had demolished the subterranean forest. The dishwasher washed, toilets flushed, socks didn’t need to be washed by hand.

When the head man handed me an invoice bringing the total to $2,400 I almost kissed him with relief and we all parted on the best of terms.

Since then, however, I have been thrusting out of my mind the thought that the idea that the road would have to be dug up was simply dreamed up to make the bill seem low.

Instead I have had to find consolation elsewhere, remembering the story a friend told me about a Russian who ordered a car and was told it would be delivered in 10 years. “OK,” he said, “but please come in the morning.” Why the morning? the salesman asked. “The plumber is coming that afternoon,” he explained.

REG GREEN lives in La Cañada. His website is www.nicholasgreen.org.