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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Things that make you go ‘Ewww’ Things that make you go ‘Ewww’ By Columnist Jim Cegielski For a large man, I get grossed out pretty easily. I get squeamish around pretty much any of the following … dead and/or decaying animals, dead and/or decaying people, jellyfish, vomit, phlegm, unidentifiable leftovers, anything in formaldehyde, exploding heads, most squishy things and any type of hair that gets caught on the back of my tongue. Raw sewage is another gag inducer. Luckily, most of us have professionals handle all of our normal, everyday raw sewage disposal needs. Unfortunately, occasionally a raw sewage crises will rear its ugly head causing a situation in which you can’t avoid direct contact with it. That is what happened recently at my house. As it goes with any crises involving sewage, we, of course, had relatives visiting at the time. My brother-in-law and his family had come down from New Jersey (ironically nicknamed “The Sewage State”) to visit us for a few days when all of the toilets in our house began to back up. Not only would the toilets refuse to flush, we started to get the very worst kind of seepage from underneath the toilets onto our nice clean bathroom floors. In a matter of a few seconds, we went from having a nice friendly, family get together to an all-out code brown. I don’t know much about caring for your common American Standard toilet, but I do know that when one of those babies refuses to flush, you grab the stick with the rubber bowl shaped head and proceed to shove it into the mouth of the beast. That’s exactly what I did. I plunged, pillaged and plundered but to no avail. The fact that more than one toilet was backed up and that filthy brown water was leaking out from around the base probably would have tipped off a normal person that plunging wasn’t going to solve the problem. Not me. I was bound and determined to plunge my toilets back to health. I didn’t give up until my wife, Carolyn, came into the bathroom and told me, “You can stop plunging. I just got off the phone with Roto-Rooter and they said you need to go open up the sewer cleanout valve.” Exhausted, I dropped my plunger, turned to her and in my best Gary Colman impression said, “What you talkin’ about, Willis?” Carolyn told me that Roto-Rooter would be out later that evening, but in the meantime I had to go out and open up the “sewer cleanout valve,” so that sewage wouldn’t continue to back up into our house. It was then that I asked my lovely wife, “Where would I find this mythical sewer cleanout valve, and, if by chance I actually track it down, how in the world do I go about opening it?” She replied, “They told me it would be somewhere out in the yard and you are going to have to figure out how to open it.” Then under her breath, I heard her mutter, “Gosh, I wish I would have married a man.” She will never know just how close she came to getting plunged that evening. As with all household repair crises, it was a Sunday night, so my brother-in-law and I started scouring the front yard with flashlights looking for anything that might be holding back raw sewage. It only took us a few minutes before we happened across a white plastic cap, which was located smack dab in the middle of the front yard. It was something I had mowed over a hundred times, but never really knew what it was. I was about to find out. I knelt down and began to unscrew the cap when all of the sudden, liquid started shooting out of the sides. I knew we had hit the mother lode. It was like we had struck oil, except that it wasn’t black gold or Texas tea that was bubbling out into my front yard. No, I had opened up a raw sewage geyser. I quickly named it “Old Waste-Fill.” As soon as the liquid stopped squirting, I reached down and unscrewed the cap the rest of the way and yanked it off. In retrospect, I probably should have worn gloves. As soon as the cap came off, as Flatt and Scruggs might have sung, “Up from the ground came a bubbling poo.” As my brother-in-law and I stood there watching the raw sewage ooze onto my front lawn, I turned to him and asked, “So how long are you and your family planning on staying with us?” They left for Disney World the very next day. For some reason they left without as much as a handshake goodbye.
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