calming

This is the beginning of the aftermath of the bathroom fiasco:



And a slightly closer view:




Just to the right of the tub is a two foot open pipe sticking straight up out of the floor that lets air into the system and through which a large amount of sludgy brownish-black liquid came spurting out yesterday.

I was in my room reading (playing video games) when I heard an odd bubbling noise outside. It quickly stopped so I didn't think anything of it. A few moments later it started again and I decided that my roommate must be filling a jug of some sort in the bathroom sink, though I was pretty sure he had left an hour ago, I must just not have heard him come back. But this time the noise didn't stop. So I cautiously opened my bedroom door (my bedroom is next to the bathroom and my roommate has the annoying habit of sometimes leaving the bathroom door open when he does his business [if you know what I mean]) and immediately noticed the bathroom waste basket floating in a sea of black with much more on its way.

I was the only one home and had no idea what apartment the super was in so I tried calling my roommate but apparently the only number I have of his in my phone is the landline in our apartment and that didn't do me any good. By this time I was starting to freak out a bit because the sludge just kept coming so I jammed the stopper in the air pipe which did slow things down a little but also made the remaining sludge shoot out at a more pressurized velocity, thus hitting me. I was seriously starting to consider putting on some clothes (did I mention I was still in my underwear and it was around 2 o'clock?), leaving and just pretending that I wasn't home when this happened. Then came a furious knock on the door. I threw on some pants and a shirt and ran to the door and heard a man call "Super" from outside. Thank god.

The sludge finally stopped coming but to achieve that end the workers had to break through my other roommate's closet wall to put a snake into one of the water pipes. Luckily our bathroom is slightly sloped away from the door so none of the liquid went into the rest of the apartment and the rest on the floor of the bathroom was mopped up with our bathmat, which was already getting soggy so why not use it to finish the job.

So that black liquid? Water and rust and lots of it. Then other things happened, including being told the problem was fixed only to have the tub start to fill up on its own again not half an hour later. The upshot is I finally showered at 7PM and this morning our bathroom still smells like rust because a lot of water got behind the sink counter, which we can't move, so we'll probably just have to deal with it.

My roommate did most of the cleaning, which was a nice gesture (I totally volunteered to help) but I'll probably end up cleaning the bathroom again myself anyway because that's what his cleaning was: a gesture.