[I guess I like to write about bathroom stuff, judging from the subject matter of many of my past notes. Maybe I’m overly fond of toilet humour. Maybe I need to get my brain out of the drain, my mind out of the grime (that’s not actually an expression, I’m just hoping you’ll be impressed by the rhyme and not realise). But there’s a lot that can be said about bathrooms; toilets especially. Not only are they different the world round, they offer insight into that particular culture, that particular house, that particular owner (not to mention user – and I promise I won’t end every sentence in this note with a parenthetical aside). Or perhaps it’s simply that, seeing as most of my brilliant ideas come to me when I’m in the shower, those ideas are in fact directly tied to the environment in which they are conceived. Whatever it is, this is another piece about bathrooms; well, home waste disposal systems anyway, as you probably gathered from the title, and it is, IMHO (the ‘H’ in this case standing for ‘honest’, rather than ‘humble’) quite a good piece at that. If at the end you want to protest that it’s in fact as much about words as it is about drains, well, 1) that’s what the comment function is for; 2) that’s kind of what I’m all about.]
I live in a big house. I mean very big. Big as in you look at the front and you think, wow, that’s a big house, and then you go round the side and you realise that what you thought was the front was actually the side and the real front is at least as long. And even though it’s what you might call a duplex, meaning we don’t have access to the entire house and sometimes hear strange noises coming from the half we aren’t in, the part we do have access to is plenty massive. Basement, ground floor, first floor (which I’m used to calling the second floor), and attic – three kitchens, three toilets, two showers, seven bedrooms, one living room. It’s huge.
Right now I have all of that to myself, because my six housemates have all gone home for the summer. I chose not to make the expensive flight back to Japan and instead look for hopefully-peace-studies-related work here in Bradford. Happily I’ve found some work; sadly, it doesn’t pay, so I’ll need to look elsewhere for dosh -perhaps Youtube. And while my house contract expires at the end of this month and I’ll be moving in with a friend, for the next to weeks I am the king of this mansion, king and pretty much every other title except landlord.
Mansion is a nice word, isn’t it? At least for me, it conjures up images of a grand old manor with many rooms, elegant architecture, and most of all, history. Stories. Perhaps an elderly man in a robe wandering the property to tell them. But the old in this image is the good ‘old’, not the bad ‘old’. My house could be called a mansion, I suppose; after all, it is grand, it has many rooms, it’s made of Yorkshire stone which I hear back in the day was a pretty penny (oh, and I might mention that it’s not one of those rowhouses you see elsewhere in Bradford – one house that looks like a giant caterpillar of about six houses – mine is a double at most, proportionate, and situated at the end of the street. Cobbled street, mind you.) If I take the role of the elderly man minus the robe, and yes, I am about to tell you some stories, my house could rest quite comfortably in the mansion-class lounge at the airport. Or wherever else mansions go to hobnob. However, the ‘old’ of my house is most definitely the bad ‘old’.
All the kitchens and toilets make for a lot of potential drainage problems, and the datedness of the building makes it not even worth including the word ‘potential’. We’ve had cloggage issues all year long. I’ve learnt a valuable lesson about mopping up the excess grease in the frying pan with a paper towel and throwing this away rather than pouring all the grease in the sink for it to congeal around the U-bend. But I’d like to think I haven’t been the primary source of these problems. Barring a detailed analysis of the contents removed from these pipes I guess we’ll never know, and for that task, my hand isn’t raised.
During the year, when something would stop up, someone would call the landlord and he would get someone in to fix it. I was certainly doubting the proficiency of this particular plumber as, this month, everything seemed to be once again clogging up around me, but that lack of faith wasn’t the reason I didn’t want to phone the landlord.
I wouldn’t necessarily call myself a manly man. I generally don’t watch sports on TV unless I have some other reason to be in the room. I often carry a man-purse or murse or manbag or whatever you want to call it. I really don’t need to be the one ‘manning’ the barbecue grill, even though I seem to end up with that responsibility when the others get bored. I don’t mind clothes shopping, and sometimes I catch myself making shockingly effeminate hand gestures while speaking, like Chris Bosh-level effeminate (does the name-dropping and clip redeem me from my statement about sports?). I can’t – and this is the worst, probably – drive stick. Most of this doesn’t bother me terribly, although I do plan to someday learn how to charm a manual transmission. But I hate being helpless. I hate not knowing how to fix stuff that I use. I don’t have a car but if I get one I want to at least know how to make simple repairs on it. Changing a tire is a test of manliness, and if my memory of driver’s ed serves me correctly I believe that I could pass that test, should the need arise. I want to be able to do basic troubleshooting on a computer, though in some respects increasing computerisation is at odds with traditional measures of manliness. In light of this development it is even more crucial that I, as a man, be able to handle elementary mechanical difficulties. And what’s more, when an appliance refuses to cooperate, I take it personal (not ‘personally’, seeing as I also get more American when my authority as an operator is challenged).
In other words, to call the landlord is to admit defeat, and I hate admitting defeat. The more something matters to me, or the more I think I should be able to do it, the more I hate admitting defeat. It’s like using a cheat in a video game, or referring to a walkthrough someone’s put online. In the video game of Bradley the Travelling MK and Budding Man versus the World, specifically in Chapter 22: 1 Melbourne Place – Level 31: The Clogged Shower Drain, I was not about to admit defeat.
The shower was the worst, at least in terms of usage impediment and added disgustingness. When the ground floor kitchen sink got clogged I just started taking my dishes back upstairs to wash them in my kitchen (I’ve had to cook downstairs for the past few months due to my stove not working – I don’t consider the inability to repair gas wiring an affront to my manliness) or else I would use the clogged sink anyway and then just exit the scene and leave it to drain at a snail’s pace. The latter option increased in frequency when the upstairs kitchen sink clogged as well. However with the shower, I had to deal with several inches of soapy scummy water sloshing around as I cleaned myself, and though I could employ the ever-useful exit-the-scene recourse there as well, the next morning I would have an abundance of hairs and scum decorating the shower floor, staring back at me. Yes, I have a lot of body hair. I used to be more self-conscious about it, but now it only really bothers me when I see it in places other than on my body. I’ll be grateful for my pelt density when all my peers are going bald, and as I established above I don’t have enough manliness points accumulated to sacrifice them to chest-shaving or waxing or whatever the cooligans are doing these days. At any rate this was the drain’s problem, not mine.
I don’t know what made this morning THE morning. Maybe I’d just reached my breaking point. Maybe it was the fact that I gave it a thorough clean with a sponge and spray and then realised all the scum would come to rest exactly where it had been because the drain was refusing flat-out to take it. Whatever it was, I went looking for something to stick down it, something like a wire clothes hanger.
This wasn’t the first time I’d attempted to solve that problem myself. About a week earlier I’d read online that baking soda and vinegar worked well for dislodging drain blockages. Unfortunately, all I had was baking powder and wine vinegar, so all that gave me was a wisp of smoke and some froth. I found some bona fide drain unstopper in the middle (ground floor) kitchen and even though the website containing the baking soda/vinegar combo had propounded the evils of unnatural solutions (pun intended – isn’t it annoying when people say that just to highlight their cleverness that they’re certain you’re too dumb to catch without blinking neon signs pointing to it?), after a few days of being intimidated by the ‘For professional and trade use only’ warning, the annoyance grew larger than my preference to be ‘natural’ and I poured this self-assured 95 per cent sulphuric acid down that shower drain. It smoked more than the baking soda. It smelled like rotten eggs (or at least what I assume rotten eggs smell like, having never actually smelled rotten eggs). It too proved ineffective.
Back to the present. The website had also talked about fishing the clogging substances out with a wire clothes hanger, of which I had none, not having been able to collect any in this particular chapter of the Bradley game. It or anything like it was nowhere to be found in my inventory, you might say. I tried sticking a knife down the drain, as that had been useful in Level 30 – unclogging the sink drain in my kitchen – when combined with unscrewing some piping below, but the knife was to wide for the shower drain. The only other similarly-shaped object I could find was a pen, but upon approaching the drain wielding it, I thought better of that tactic. I would’ve dropped it in, most def.
All this time I knew I could use the basement shower, but enough was enough. However, I was out of ideas. I got into the shower (as that intent was what had triggered all this activity this morning, which explains for you why I was naked this entire time – I wasn’t kidding when I said ‘minus the robe’, you know!) and was just about to turn on the water for another scummy jab at my manliness when my eye fell upon none other than the plunger.
Ah, the plunger. I am no stranger to that most oddly-built of implements, I must admit, though thankfully I had not previously required this particular plunger in its traditional capacity, our middle toilet – cracked though it may be – repeatedly proving itself quite up to the task of digesting my excrement. Other toilets in my life have been less satisfactory; American ones especially, which is odd considering they serve a clientele of much larger average body size than their high-tech multifunction Japanese counterparts. But you can read more about that in another of my articles. Suffice it to say that I have honed my plunger skill over the years (as well as, in lieu of a plunger, the strategic use of the exit-the-scene course of action) but had never applied it to a non-toilet drain. Considering someone had mentioned it in the comments on the natural solutions website, I thought it at least worth a shot.
In my early plunging days, when I was but an amateur, I used to go for large pulls, hoping to time it for precisely when the pressure from the rising water level was at its highest. This method was unreliable and inefficient, as it limited plunging to once per flush which meant waiting until the water slowly drained to where I could flush again. In the worst cases, when the water level was virtually at a standstill, it was useless, and worst of all, it sometimes led to disastrous splash-back. Ugh. Fortunately over the years my technique matured, notably following the discovery of the push-pull maneuvre in which the user gently pushes the plunger into full suction and then executes a series of rapid pulls and pushes up and down, without breaking the seal, which creates what I imagine to be the equivalent of an underwater earthquake in the general vicinity of the U-bend and, in my experience, effectively unclogs the toilet 100 per cent of the time with minimal risk of splash-back. Oh the elation of seeing the murky water swirl down the hole with a glorious glug-glug-glug!
And so armed with this plunger (a conventional red; cup, not flange, well-suited to this task, I later learned) and the wisdom of many years of plunging, I approached this boss-level blocked shower drain and applied the suction. It was a foreign application of a familiar operation and I was dubious as to its chances, but nevertheless entered the push-pull phase.
There were a few moments when nothing seemed to happen. Then, with a quietness incommensurate to so momentous an occasion, a hole appeared in the water above the drain and the rest flowed over the rounded sides into the narrow abyss. I couldn’t believe it! In so little time and with so little effort it seemed my troubles were at their end! It took the rest of my shower for me to really believe it, but the drain clarity held and I finished my cleansing ritual swimmingly, which in this case ironically meant without swimming. It had been a long time since I’d seen the shower floor at the end of a shower (and it was perhaps my preoccupation with this while towelling off that caused my elbow to knock one of the three soap/shampoo racks off its screw; however, this far along in the game I was well-accustomed to dealing with such petty foes, catching it in midair and returning it to its place without fuss).
Jubilant at this victory (on a par with the Queen at her 60-year celebration, I daresay), the much-awaited clearance of Level 31, I proceeded to (yes, i know that phrase is over-used, but I wasn’t the one to over-use it and I quite feel that it’s justified in this case) the middle kitchen with plunger in hand. Would it work on a sink as well?
I turned the tap on drizzle and watched the sink fill slowly – disappointing specimen – then assumed the position and began. But this opponent was equipped with a defence mechanism; my first vigorous thrust was returned in kind with water shooting back at me from the overflow hole! I retreated to regroup. Should I try something else? Having nothing else to try (I’d already previously unscrewed the piping below and scraped it out, which hadn’t worked like it had upstairs; rather, it’d left the piping clogged AND leaking) I closed in once more. Holding my hands above the level of the overflow hole eliminated that threat, but it did mean that I needed to stagger my thrusts to keep the drain flooded and therefore pressurised. It took longer than the shower, but in time this adversary did too acquiesce. And this time, it rewarded me with the fading, defeated cry of ‘Glug, glug, glug…’.
And so ends this particular episode in Chapter 22 of Bradley versus the World. I sense the finale of this chapter drawing near, and fear that this was not actually its big-boss level. What will that be? The skies are growing darker.
However this clearance was glorious and I intend to savour it gladly. I hope you’ve enjoyed this walkthrough; though Bradley is still in beta-testing and not yet available to the public, you may be able to find applications for these techniques in other games. Myself, I’m thinking that perhaps ‘master plunger’ would be a skill worth adding to my CV in Level 28: Getting a Job, yet uncleared. Is there anywhere I can get certified for that sort of thing, I wonder?
To conclude, here’s a brief overview of some of the other levels I’ve cleared in this chapter.
Level 6: Insufficient Clothes-Drying Devices
Level 7: The Lack of Sink-side Towel Rack
Level 8: The Uncooperative Toilet Seat
Level 11: The Frictionless Showerhead Holder
Level 14: Attack of the Flies
Level 21: Save the House from Burning Down was a harrowing ordeal. I still don’t know how I managed to clear that one; certainly wouldn’t have without the assistance of the other characters in my party. I won’t give away everything but I will hint that you need to make sure that by this point in the game you’ve acquired the power to call in a fire department strike.
Bonus Level: Clean the Garden, which I haven’t completed but did have a go at the other day.
Till next time, this is Bradley the Travelling MK and Budding Man, signing off. If the next mission is what I think it is, it will be a doozy for which I must seriously prepare.
Inspiration's Waiting Room 