Being a plumber is not always easy; at time, it can prove to be one of the grossest and most horrifying jobs. So, here are some stories that can make you laugh and cringe!
A ‘Lake Of Sh*t’ With Maggots
Me and my boss went to a mobile home on a farm for a quick drain clean (at the end of our day) because their shower was draining slowly… She shows us the crawl space and notes she never goes down there because she hates spiders. My boss (a very religious man who rarely curses and is always optimistic) goes down the hole into the crawl space and about one minute in, you just hear him say, “Oh sh*t,” so he comes back up and I ask, “Is it bad?” He says, “Oh, yeah.” He says it looks like a broken pipe. Not that bad right?
So I go down to take a look. Since they had an addition built on (which was where the shower was that was draining slowly), there was a sewer main pipe coming out of the original concrete footing with the rubber coupling connecting the addition to the rest of the house. It had completely disconnected and had been draining into this dirt crawl space so long that it eroded away one of the supports for the floor under their bedroom, where they informed us that the doors had been tough to close for about a year (due to the sunken support, the floor wasn’t level).
There was a lake of sh*t in the 3-foot crawl space with thousands of maggots. So we had to fix it by laying pallets in the sh*t lake so we could get to the rubber coupling and replace it.
TLDR: lake of sh*t with thousands of maggots in every stage under a mobile home.
A Live Turd
I’m not a plumber but I used to do drain-laying when I was fresh out of high school. One day one of the guys broke an underground sewer pipe and me, my team leader and this old co-worker who was experienced in pipe repair had to go fix it. We dug into where the break was with the digger and it resulted in a 600 mm deep hole with about 200 mm of that hole filled with human waste.
Our team leader immediately noped out of there and excuses himself by saying, “You guys carry on; I need to go to the hardware store to buy something for our next job,” and never returned back to site.
We tell the residents who live in that house: “Please don’t use the toilet until we finish fixing your pipe.” About 20 minutes into fixing the pipe a live turd comes racing down followed by toilet paper and water. The hole fills up with sh*t water again and my co-worker nopes out of there.
Frozen in Time
We have a story from our very own Creative Marketing Director, Greg Guess, who used to do some plumbing work of his own. His story began at 2 am when he received a call from his boss asking if he wanted to make some extra money. Greg accepted and made his way to a nursing home where a water main had broken. Not only was it the middle of the night, but it was freezing outside. Working in wet conditions, he did a lot of backhoe digging. As he was digging, steam came up from the water, and the dirt was freezing on his equipment.
At last, he found the leak and ordered a full circle repair clamp. Because this plumbing disaster occurred overnight, he had the industrial supply shop open up at 3 in the morning to get the supplies he needed. Nonetheless, he fixed the water main and thus heroically saved the nursing home residents from the plumbing disaster. As he said, “All you need to know is that it was a cold, wet, and freezing experience.”