Category: Plumbing

“Rylee?” Maphira called into the abyssal darkness. No response, yet again.

She flicked her flashlight on for but a moment, needing to preserve its batteries. It didn’t have long before it left her in the abyss for good. She couldn’t think of much worse than being trapped in Melbourne’s sewer system.

Other than, of course, having to crawl back to her sister and beg her for help. It didn’t get much more humiliating than that. Having to crawl through the muck and waste dressed as a drain plumber offering service in Melbourne, which only added a little bit of insult to injury.

“Rylee, where are you? I’m sorry! We could really use your help!” Maphira dug nails into her palms. “Don’t make me say it! Fine! You’re the smarter sister and I’ve always been jealous of how awesome you are!”

“Well, you should have just said so.” Rylee’s voice came from several feet away but in the echoing tunnels of the labyrinthian cesspool, she might as well have screamed right in Maphira’s ear.

When her fright-boosted adrenaline faded, Maphira turned back to her sister. “How long have you been there?”

“Quite a while. I was just waiting for you to say the magic words. I assume you need the passcode, right? I’ll tell you right now, it has something to do with plumbers for blocked drains near Essendon.”

“Thanks for that, sis. Really useful.” Maphira didn’t even bother to see if Rylee would follow. She simply passed her and started on the way back to the solar facility, knowing her little sister would cooperate now that she’d had her daily source of validation. “You’d better not ruin this for me. The police force might not have been for you, but my entire career is on the line here.”

Rylee pulled out her phone and lit the path ahead. “Don’t worry, unlike some people in our family, I actually respect the life decisions of others.”

Maphira scoffed. So, that was how this was going to be. Why would she have expected anything less from the brat goddess that was her sister?

The first session went well. This week has flown by which is why I haven’t been able to update you until now. It’s Friday afternoon and we have our second informal plumbing group lesson tomorrow. I thought I’d be updating you on the sessions each Monday but the week really got away from me. So on the eve of our next session, I’ll tell you about our last one.

To put it simply, we got our hands very dirty. I always knew it would be a difficult job to do, but I really have to take my hat off to the professional drain plumbers in Melbourne. I’m just your average joe with absolutely no experience in being a plumber, but even if I had the experience I think it would be a pretty difficult feat. 

By the end of the eight-hour session, the majority of us had got the hang of how to do a sewer replacement. Even though we have had a bit of practice doing sewer replacements now, I’ve decided that there’s no way I’d ever do one myself. It’s just too big a job and I have literally no professional experience. All my friends agreed that this would be the case.

Seeing as we started with the big guns, we’ve decided to try some more basic things for tomorrow’s session. I proposed that we go around the nearby streets and see if we spot any blocked drains. Brighton and nearby suburbs apparently have a lot of them because of the stormwater. We’re going to see if we can identify them and then unblock them ourselves. We’re not sure how easy this will be, but at least we’re giving it a go and will be doing good deeds for some of the locals. At the very least, it’ll be a fun day hanging out with my mates in the warm winter sun. 

Here’s hoping it goes well!

Our shower has been the bane of our existence for a long time now. I live in a shared apartment with four other people and we only have one bathroom, which causes a lot of problems as you could imagine.

Three of my housemates are girls with really long hair. Now, I’m no stranger to living with girls. I lived with my mum and sister for twenty-five years, so I know that long hair can cause blocked drains. Close to Brighton, it’s common practice now to (apologies in advance for saying this), put the hair that has been shed on the shower door to then put in the bin later. That way it doesn’t go down the drain and block it. However, I live in the Melbourne CBD now and apparently, that’s not how they do things here. Our shower drains have clogged three times now – and I’ve only been living here for six months…

I tried to have an intervention with my female housemates. I sat them down and told them what my mum and sister do, and how it saved us a lot of money over the years. They said that it was disgusting and certainly not something that they would ever do. I told them it was more disgusting having goo come up through our drains whilst I was showering, but they said that can easily be fixed with a drain replacement. In the Melbourne CBD, it costs an arm and a leg to get a drain repair, or replacement or whatever. I don’t want to have to do this more than once in my lease, because simply, none of us can afford it.

I probably should have thought about what it would be like to live with three girls with long hair. I just assumed that they’d do that thing that all girls do, but apparently not. It’s causing problems, that’s for sure.

That’s my life now: walk into the wrong room, change jobs forever. Maybe it’s in my blood; after all, my dad was a carpenter, and that’s basically the same thing as plumbing. It just involves more wood and furniture instead of plungers and pipes. I bet plumbers in Melbourne and carpenters get along just fine. Actually, why aren’t more pipes made of wood? Oh yeah, the soggy factor. See, I’d know this if I was a plumber. Correction: I WILL know, when I’m a plumber. Working with my hands is most definitely in the family, which I guess is why my IT career wasn’t going anywhere.

They did send me to a conference, which I was excited about at first, until Lenny said that it’s what they do to everyone who they want out of the office for a weekend. They find the cheapest conference in the cheapest place they can find and send them away for a bit, so that everyone else can get some work done. So…yeah, that was a blow to my confidence, in a job that was already starting to get me down. Like, have you tried turning it off, and the turning it back on again? You haven’t, and the problem is fixed? Good for you, talk to you again in an hour or so when you have basically the same problem.

And then I walked into ‘Plumbing 101: Pipes for aPprentices!’. They could’ve worked on the title, but even after I realised I was in the wrong room (IT was across the hall; ‘Computer Class: Creating Crafty Keyboard shortCuts!’), I felt like I belonged. And I didn’t even learn anything! For real, all the guy talked about was how as a plumber, we should respect the power of the wrench and feel the nuance of the plunger. Clearly he wasn’t one of Melbourne’s plumbing service professionals, which made sense since the conference was out in the sticks. Still, this terrible presentation spoke to me at my core. I’m going to quit my job! Go to plumbing school! Become a plumber! FEEL THE PLUNGER NUANCE.

I mean, it could be good advice. Maybe I’ll ask on my first day of class.

-Vaughn