The Sound of Drips

The roof had been leaking; that was an established problem, one of a long list of problems in my house.  Not constantly, not consistently, but ever so often when we had a really heavy downpour that went on for hours, the roof leaked.  It leaked down the side of the chimney and into my second-floor kitchen.  It discolored the ceiling in two places, and a little drip sometimes came through and dripped on my floor.  I had refinanced last year and taken out money to cover the cost of a new roof, but had postponed it in a fall full of craziness and psychodrama and surgery.   But I was all ready to do the roof this spring.  So last week when it poured heavily on Monday and Tuesday and the kitchen ceiling started to drip, I was annoyed, but mostly with myself for putting off the work.

Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.

I put a bucket under the drip and called up roofers and waited for the rain to stop and things to dry out.  And that was all fine until I came home Tuesday during the downpour and found a foot-wide hole in the ceiling, a kitchen-sized puddle and soggy shards of sheetrock on the kitchen floor, and a much bigger leak.  After much frantic hopping about with mops and towels and a bucket, I had that temporarily under control.  Putting off the roofwork had really been a bad idea.  Nothing I could do about it now until the rain stopped.

Drip.  Drip.  Drip.  Drip.

The dripping sound was driving me mad. 

Wednesday the rain stopped.  The leak slowed down; I still had runoff in the ceiling, apparently.  Joy.  I called roofers.  Thursday it started to rain again.  It rained off and on all day Thursday and Friday.  Drips dripped.  I was badly on edge from the constant dripping sound and having to deal with buckets of icky water and random puddles.

Drip, drip, drip, drip.

Saturday, the rain finally fizzled out and the forecast was for three or four dry days.  I was relieved.  But I still had this drip.  I heard the drip in my dreams (which involved me wafting around in a navy blue evening gown with wings on my back and a white plastic bag wrapped around my hair).  I fancied that the drip was getting faster.  It certainly didn't seem to be stopping.  I emptied the bucket ever so often and paced frantically around the kitchen willing it to stop.

Dripdripdripdripdrip.

Sunday I had to go to the city to teach.  When I got home that night, after a long day of travel and dance and psychodrama, things had worsened dramatically.  My bucket was overflowing, the kitchen was semi-flooded, and I now had a four-foot hole in the ceiling with a drip so constant it threatened to evolve into a steady flow and bits of soggy sheetrock and plaster scattered everywhere.  And there had been no rain for 48 hours. 

Unpleasant conclusion: this was not rain runoff.  Yeah, I'm a little bit slow here, but seriously: how unlucky does one have to be to have both a plumbing leak and a roof leak in exactly the same spot?  What sort of bizarre coincidence is that?  At least there were no bats.

After more frantic hopping about with towels and mops and pots I had the immediate situation more-or-less stabilized.  I trotted up the stairs to my tenant apartment, did some careful pacing and eyeballing, and decided that the problem was under my tenant's bathtub.  The faucets weren't on or leaking.  The problem must be in the wall somewhere.  How inspiring. 

I went back downstairs and called my plumber.  A chipper answering machine message informed me that my plumber was on maternity leave and to please call back in June.  This is what I get for having a cool female plumber who writes books on the side.  (Or is it a cool writer who does plumbing on the side?)  Now, apparently, she's a mother. 

I didn't think this could wait until June.

I shifted to calling around to emergency all-night plumbing services that advertised no extra charge for night calls.  (It was now 11:30pm and all I wanted to do was go to sleep.)  Who would have thought that midnight plumbing was such a hot ticket?  All the plumbing services I called had all their people out working on other people's late-night miseries.  I finally found one that didn't have a plumber free, but had a drain guy.  They promised that he would at least make the leak stop.  By this time I was being driven mad by the steady dripdripdripdripdrip, and would have been happy with the New England Patriots quarterbacks coach and the entire offensive line if they could just make it stop.

Joe showed up in about twenty minutes.  After some peering around in my ceiling he treated me to a lecture on the basics of water systems (short version: even when faucets are not on, all the pipes are full of pressurized water, so a leak in a supply pipe will continue to leak), said it was probably a valve on the shower upstairs that had failed - with the ceiling conveniently opened up he could see it dripping down - and went to the basement to simply shut down the entire house's water.  Joy.  But the leak, as promised, stopped immediately.  I gave Joe a lot of money and went to write a note to my tenant explaining why we had no water.  The plumbing service promised to send a real plumber at 7:30am and deduct the money I'd just paid from the service cost.  I was visualizing my next water bill and wondering why exactly I had ever wanted to be a homeowner, and especially the owner of a very old house with ancient plumbing.

The sweet sound of drip-free silence in the morning did not make up for being unable to shower or wash up properly.  I am not a morning person, even on mornings that do not involve plumbers.  I do not believe I should have to deal with tradesmen, or anyone else, at 7:30am, before having a shower.

Victor arrived as promised.  We turned the water on briefly so he could see the leak.  But there was a problem.  The leak didn't leak.  Not a drop visible.

Okay.

We turned the water back on and left it on.

No leak.

We went upstairs, where we discovered, happily, that there was an access panel (typically for this house, that meant a piece of plywood) behind the shower wall, so at least this was not going to involve completely retiling the upstairs shower.

No leak to be found.

My tenant came downstairs and asked if he could shower.  We told him to go ahead, and stared hopefully up at the ceiling.

No leak.  Not a drop.  Victor was up on a ladder with his head in the ceiling, and I was standing in the kitchen doing the sheep look up bit, and there was not a bit of water in sight.

Victor came down the ladder and said that I didn't have a leak.  If I had a leak, it would be leaking; leaks don't just stop.  I reminded him that last night I had had a leak; Joe told me I had a leak.  Water had been dripping.  Joe had been soggy. 

Victor was immovable.  There was no leak.  He was not going to take my plumbing apart when there was no leak.  Was I absolutely sure there had been water leaking?  I pointed to the soggy debris all over the kitchen floor by way of evidence.  A shrug from Victor.  Leaks do not just stop, and there was no leak now, so I didn't have a leak.

While I really did appreciate the honesty and certainly didn't want to pay him to dissect my plumbing on spec, I was a little bit becroggled here.  It couldn't be rain runoff after so long with no rain.  And turning off the water at the main stopped it, which means it had to be somewhere in my pipes, right? 

Plumber apprenticeships apparently do not include logic.  There was no leak, therefore there was no leak.  Victor suggested that maybe I had a ghost. 

Yeah, that's a big help. 

I was getting the distinct impression he thought I had imagined the leak, or maybe that I  had demolished my own ceiling just to get a plumber to come out and visit me in some sort of plumbing-centered version of Munchausen's Syndrome.  But we really did have an impasse here.  No water to show him the problem spot, so he couldn't trace it to fix it, so there wasn't a thing he could do.  And all I could do was leave the ceiling open and wait to see if the leak came back.  Great.  I was told to call them immediately without turning off the water if the leak reappeared, and I gave Victor a great deal of money for the service call.  This did nothing to improve my mood.  At least it wasn't dripping any more.

On the bright side, if we ever do find a leak, all these service call charges will probably cover the entire bill for fixing it.  On the less bright side, I now have to put up with a hole in my ceiling until we fix the problem, since I am not about to sacrifice more sheetrock to the cause.

I finally took my shower, checked hopefully for a leak (nope), and got to work an hour and a half late.  On the way, I meditated on the leak issue.  I would like to believe it was a roof leak.  Since I need to replace the roof anyway, that would presumably solve the problem.  But I could find no hole in my logic.  I am willing to accept a ghost, a magical bag of water holding that suddenly decided to empty itself through my kitchen ceiling, or a mystical transdimensional portal to an ocean planet.  I am a fan of speculative fiction; my imagination is stretchy.  But it is not stretchy enough to believe that my ghost, or bag of holding, or transdimensional portal, or whatever was pouring water through my ceiling, is controlled by the water main in the basement.  If we turn off the water and the leak stops, the leak is not supernatural in nature.  Nor is it runoff.  There have been strange coincidences in my life (starting with the location of this leak), but I don't think that turning off the water to the house and having rain runoff magically stop is one of them.

So I am left, insanely enough, hoping that when I get home, I will have a leak.

Inside my head, I can still hear it dripping.

Update: the end of the story may be found in a followup post, "The Last of the Ghost Leak".

Comments

[Marilee J. Layman]

Hmmm, that's very odd. The only thing I can think of is that the leak made something in the shower area loose or smaller and when it had a chance to dry off, it became tight or bigger again. The roof leak might actually have started it being loose or smaller, if the roof leak leaked onto it.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Marilee:
That's my best theory too, but really have no idea what to think. The leak hasn't returned. I'm going to go ahead with the roof work in the next week or two, since that needs doing regardless, but I don't dare repair the ceiling until I am sure there's no interior leak. It's going to rain all weekend, so maybe it will reappear then. If so, I hope it's early on, since I have to be on the road this weekend and I am terrified of coming home to another flood.

[Serge]

That reminds me of the leak I found in mid-January. Mine was outside. There was a big puddle all over the backyard's lawn, the source of which I traced uphill. After some fun digging straight down, I found that the leak had simply followed the path of least resistance thru the soil. The actual break in the pipe was a bit downward. Right under a very tall and very prickly cactus. Ah, the pleasure of wading in cold mud in January...

[Susan de Guardiola]

Woo! The leak is back! Plumber is on the way! I am not turning the water off: I want the guy to see this in its, err, live and leaky state so he knows I'm not crazy or plagued by ghosts.

(Oh, and my kitchen is semi-flooded again. The mop-and-bucket routine will be worth it if we can find out what the problem is this time.)

[Serge]

How do you manage to make plumbing problems sound like fun? I must study your writing technique more closely. That being said, I do hope that the Mopping Show soon comes to a truly happy resolution before the house faces further dissolution.

[David Harmon]

My casual guess is that the leak depends on a minimum pressure at the point of damage. That would explain why it stopped immediately when you cut off the water, but took a while to return when you turned the mains back on.

Or... waitasec, your mains were in the basement, and the leak was near the roof? No effing wonder the leak didn't spring back to life when you turned the water back on -- your pipes had drained, and it takes time for the water to refill all that plumbing!

[Susan de Guardiola]

Serge:
If I've made this sound like fun, my writing is even more dreadful than I'd thought. Trust me, this is not fun. It is non-fun. It is the diametric opposite of anything that could even conceive of being fun. There is no fun involved for anyone here. I now fully understand how the drip-drip thing can constitute a form of torture; I feel like I have been aurally tortured for the last week.

I have no writing technique. I just do it. I'm a dance historian, not a writer. Or a plumber.

[Serge]

Oh, I know that the situation was no fun at all, Susan. It's just that the way you told the tale reminded me of how I've felt at times with my work as a programmer, and things kept going wrong on some Projects (aka Projects from Hell) and I'd find myself resorting to sort-of gallows humor to cope with the neverending disaster.

As for your being a dance historian, not a writer... I wish I were as good a not-writer as you are.

That being said, I do hope that your plumbing problems are soon a thing of the past.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Plumbing problems appear to be solved, though I suppose I should wait a few days before it's a certain thing. I am debating whether this warrants an entirely new post or whether I should just explain it all in the comments here.

[Serge]

So, what was the cause of the problem? As for the leak's temporary disappearance, I wonder if David Harmon was right.

[abi]

some sort of plumbing-centered version of Munchausen's Syndrome

Fantastic turn of phrase.

Do you think he would have treated you better had you been male? He reminds me of the guys I used to have to deal with when I worked on cars. Call up VW authorized parts dealers and ask for a distributor clamp that'll fit a '66 microbus, and they ask if it's for a Volkswagen.

I hope it's done with now, and that you come home to a bone-dry kitchen after the weekend.

[Susan de Guardiola]

Hard to say if it was sexism or just expertise-macho. But we are not impressed with Victor and his ghosts. Victor was replaced last night by the even more macho Lee, who really is a story unto himself, and Victor is not getting paid for failing to find my leak the first time around.

This weekend we are supposed to have five days of rain, so I suppose now I get to go back to dealing with the original roof leak. Given the relative amounts of water involved, that's much easier to cope with, and it's not like there's any more damage possible to the ceiling.

I had a lot of sexist experiences when I was doing engine work on my old cars, but those mostly turned out funny, since once you get some auto parts or machine shop guys on your side, they'll personally take down anyone else who gets snippy. It wasn't so much chivalry as a fascinating exercise in machismo-once-removed: no one got to insult ME because implying that I was too girly to know what I was doing was an indirect insult to them for helping me do it. So I must have been competent, and they would defend me against any other customer who expressed any doubts. They actually somewhat overestimated my competence - I was the junior mechanic on the engine stuff most of the time.

[abi]

Hmmm. Your auto repair experiences sound a lot like my high school weight room experiences. (I did shot put and discus, so I had to do weights.) Going into the weight room without my (male) throw team was a waste of time, because nobody would "happen" to be available to spot me. But when we went in as a team, even when one of them wasn't available to spot, those very same guys would offer.

I had forgotten that series of events. Interesting and instructive.

[Marilee J. Layman]

So what did Lee do to fix it? What was wrong?

[Carol Kimball]

Never did it seem like you were having a good time, but you did write extremely well, and humorously, yet! of it.

I await further posts with bated breath.

[joann]

And it works even weirder when you're the person trying to sell the stuff to a macho customer. I spent several years just out of college selling paint and hardware in an old-line hardware store, and the reactions to me ran the gamut--and then some. But once I got some old rancher--or some dude from Armadillo World HQ--on my side, they'd never buy stuff from anyone else. Because I'd let *them* teach *me*.

[Paul A.]

"... the Mopping Show ..."

Serge, are you perhaps thinking of The Mop-It Show?

[Serge]

Paul A... It might be.

As for the male chauvinist plumbers who dismiss the opinion of humans whose body plumbing is noticeably different from theirs... That attitude thankfully is not found in my line of work, which is information technology. Or rather, it does not appear to be in my field.

[abi]

That attitude thankfully is not found in my line of work, which is information technology.

Serge, I really wish that were the case. But my experience is entirely different; I've had a fair number of direct experiences of blatant disrespect on the basis of gender in my decade in IT. Sometimes it's just the pointed jokes (which one cannot object to without being called a humorless bitch). Sometimes it's much more severe. I know women who have quit IT altogether, and others who have changed to lower-paying jobs, to get away from harassment that management simply would not address.

You probably don't see it, because it's not directed at you.

[Serge]

You probably don't see it, because it's not directed at you.

That's why I ended my earlier post the way I did. On the other hand, the large corporation that I work for has equal numbers of women and men in IT, even among managers, and sexist barbs would not be tolerated. That may be because that corporation (which shall remain nameless) is based in San Francisco. Or it may be unique to the corporation, although I doubt it. Or, I may simply be blind to what is really going on.

It's interesting to think that, when I went to college, in the early 1970s, all of the programming dept's teachers were men, but things were obviously changing because half the students were female.

[Marilee J. Layman]

Dear Ghu, Serge, I wish you could slide into my old life and experience it! I was the first female professional in all my jobs. The naked lady posters, the assumption I'd slept my way into a professional position, the insistence that I was having my period when I made them redo bad work -- boy, it was not fun. Usually they would realize I knew what I was doing, but that didn't keep them from sexist jokes and pranks.

[Susan de Guardiola]

I clearly remember back in 1994 being addressed (in company with two female co-workers) as "lezzy bitches" (ha ha! just joking, girls!), to which my chirpy response was "only 1/6 right!" I left that job soon after. So did the boss who'd so addressed us. Involuntarily. The aftermath included suits against the company for sexual harassment, gender discrimination, age discrimination, etc. I wasn't part of the lawsuits - I decided walking away to a better job with a better salary was sufficient.

[abi]

I decided walking away to a better job with a better salary was sufficient.

Living well is always the best revenge.

[Serge]

my chirpy response was "only 1/6 right!"

Did that moron blow his brains out trying to figure that one out?

[Serge]

Marilee... Serge, I wish you could slide into my old life

Oh goodness. I hope I didn't come off as a jerk. I only said what I said based on my own experience in my own field. True, I have not been the keenest of observers, and I do know I filter things thru the filter of my being a man. On the other hand, some men would say I'm not much of a man, because I don't fit their conception of what a man should be and too bad if I don't. The bottom line is that I have never dismissed a woman's opinion, not on the basis of her plumbing. Still, I am extremely embarassed that I might have given the wrong impression about myself on the subject. Gah.

[Susan de Guardiola]

abi:
And it's been so much fun telling stories about what a jerk he was for seventeen years!

Serge:
I don't think he was a sufficiently deep thinker to file me under anything but "bitch". He hated that I was several inches taller than him, too.

[Serge]

Oh, how hellish it must be for a prick like that to deal with someone who's smarter and taller, especially a woman...

[Marilee J. Layman]

Serge, it's not your attitude, just that you didn't see it. Admittedly, I've been out for almost 22 years (I became disabled instead of walking away to a new job), but I still hear how it is from other women.

[Serge]

Marilee...

Like I said, once upon a time I was never the keenest where it came to social cues, and was blind to lots of things, not just what was happening to women. Yes, I confess, I was a nerd. I still am, but getting better at it. What I can say is that most of our group's users, all but one of whom are women, enjoy working with me and none of them ever had to smoke a cigarette to decrease any anxiety before approaching me.

But it sucks that this crap is still going on elsewhere.

[Mary Aileen sees spam]

"blocked drains" is obviously spam; the text is stolen from one of abi's posts above.

(Is this the right way to flag this, Susan? Or should I email you or something?)

[Susan de Guardiola]

Mary Aileen,
This is good. Spam will die.

[Susan de Guardiola]

(Wow, I got spammed. I feel like I've arrived or something.)

[Serge]

Susan... I feel like I've arrived

Huzzah!
I think.