Last week, with less than 5 days left before move-out, the sink backed up again. I didn't even call it in. Let it be someone else's problem, I thought. And so, with a brand new dishwasher awaiting me at the new office (something we never had at the old) I packed up all the dirty dishes to take with me and told all my coworkers not to use the sink.
Last night I took Roy, the boys and my dad to the old building to get the old refrigerator - it will be much happier as my new beer fridge than as a boring office fridge, after all! I asked my dad, a contractor by trade, to please turn off the water line to the RO system. As he reached into the small space under the sink his hand brushed against the main pipe and water started pouring out. "What the hell is that mess?" he said and laid on the ground to get a closer look.
What that mess was was the water from the backed up sink. And herein lies my complaint about hating it when I don't know stuff. If I had known more about plumbing I might have noticed at some point during the 12 years we leased the space that the plumbers the building kept sending were idiots. I might have realized that what I took for padding hours was incompetence. I might have saved the aggravation of constantly dealing with a backed up sink. Because what my dad saw in 5 seconds was that the damn pipe was never really connected! No threads, no gasket, no nut, no sealant. Simply one ill fitting pipe shoved up inside another about about an eight of an inch.
The moral to this story is that everyone needs to learn the basics of plumbing. Although apparently you don't even need to know that much to get paid by a large commercial management company to "fix" tenant's shit.
