Plumbing!

This is one of those stories that starts off with good intentions and ends with me flooding me apartment building. Brace yourself. My bathtub been draining really slowly so by the end of my bucket bathes I had been ending up standing in six inches of soapy, shampoo-filled water, and last night I decided to fix this problem myself, because by golly, I'm a Peace Corps Volunteer! :-) So, after my bath and as the water was draining, I figured I would just take the grate off the drain, remove whatever was clogging it, and screw it back on. What I didn't realize, though, was that the pipe that the water drains out of underneath the tub is only attached to the bathtub by the very screw that holds that grate in place (in my defense, doesn't that strike you as a pretty terrible system to begin with? Anyway...), so when I un-screwed the grate, the pipe dropped three inches lower from the bathtub and six inches of water immediately started to flow onto my bathroom floor.

After my panic attack subsided a little, I realized what was going on and decided to push the pipe back up to the tub with one hand and screw the grate back in with the other, a very difficult enterprise that requires lots of stretching and patience that I lacked while kneeling in a pool of murky bath water. After trying for a few minutes and with most of the water drained out anyway, I decided to just clean the clog out with a pencil and try again later. For the record, there is nothing in the world more disgusting that cleaning out SOMEONE ELSE'S hair clogs from your bathtub drain. It looked like a small petting zoo had crawled in there and died. Anyway, an hour and a sore neck and back later and I was able to screw the pipe back on. My bathtub now drains beautifully and the pool of water is gone...where it went, I can only assume, it to the apartment below mine, but no one angrily pounded on my door last night, so I assume everything is ok. The moral of the story is that plumbing is hard and we shouldn't ever make fun of plumbers. And that I'm an idiot sometimes. :-)