TheBanyanTree: I forget what moon it is without coffee

[Dale M.Parish]

I was at a funeral when the raw sewage came blasting up out of the kitchen sink at work and splattered off of the overhead cabinets onto the microwaves and the coffee maker.  One of the several contractors working outside was supposed to be clearing some pipe, and must have had a hell of a big air compressor hooked up to what ever line it was that crossed into the sink drain. 

None of us have figured out yet what line it was supposed to have been-- housed in our building are the Medical department, records storange, and our group, the Information Yoyos.  There are multiple restrooms and sinks in Medical, and both a men's and women's room with three stalls and three sinks apiece.  A lengthy investigation by the building management department of all known water inputs and outgoes failed to find any evidence of any other discharge in or around the building.  Only the sink in the shared kitchen got the backlash. 

It must have been pretty violent-- I was told that the erruption was heard all over our end of the building.  Medical and Records are sealed off behind secure doors and they didn't hear it, but the shared kitchen is in the middle of the building and also houses the coke and snack machines, and is frequented by all departments, especially at lunch time.  This happened just before lunch.

Apparently, it coated everything on the sink end of the kitchen, and the stench must have been pretty bad.  After I returned from the funeral, when I opened the east door, some 15 meters down the hall, it smelled to me like a city swimming pool from the chlorine.  Since it was soon after lunch time, I assumed the din coming from the kitchen was just the hold-overs from lunch laughing and joking before going back to work, and as I neared the east kitchen door-- it's on a corner and there is both an east and north door-- I glanced in to check to see if there was fresh coffee in the coffee maker as I usually do when I enter the building from that end.  

It was a bit of a shock to see that there was no coffee maker where it has sat for the past couple of years, and there were several people in moon suits on ladders over the sink.  My stride took me around the corner, where I was greeted with "Don't go in there!!" when I was noticed from within.  "You don't want to go in there-- it's BAD!"  

"What's bad?  What happened?"  

"Oh, you could have heard it all over the building.  They blew raw sewage out the sink and splattered the kitchen."  That was when I noticed a friend in the building management group coming out of the kitchen.  

Mark laughed, shaking his head, and asked, "Do you know if there's any more mechanical rooms on this end of the building?"  I'd had to call his group out one night when I'd been paged that we had a "high moisture" alarm under the floor of the server room, and had discovered that one of the two big humidifiers had sprung a water leak and was flooding the floor.  We'd had to trace all the water lines through the raised flooring to find the shut-off valve.  

The only "mechanical room" on our end was 'dry'-- it was the electrical conrol room for the servers and UPS, and there was certainly no water in there.  He shook his head telling me about it, and went off down the hall with the blueprints and helper, wanting to be certain that the incident had been limited to only the kitchen.

Last night, after all the hourly people left, a disaster clean-up contractor moved in to begin wiping down all the walls, ceiling, floors, fixtures, etc., with clorox impregnated towels.  The stench finally got so bad that I left for class early.  

Today, we had no coffee.  While the company furnishes us with all the coffee we can drink, the service of the coffee machines and supplies is contracted out, and no one seemed to know when or if any replacement would come.  After lunch, I looked up to see Danny, the coffee-guy, come in with a new Bunn coffee maker.  He stopped to explain that it was a little different style, but knew that it would fit under the cabinet.  We'd gone through three other models when we'd first moved into this remodeled building year-before-last, trying to get one that would fit under the kitchen cabinet but that didn't have a warmer plate on top where an extra carafe couldn't fit.  

That's when it got interesting.  One of the building management people happened in at that time, and wanted Danny to remove the old coffee maker and dispose of it.  They had already agreed that the "project" was going to pay for it, but Danny advised that knowing how much of a stickler the company is for safety, he would not remove it and guarantee that it wouldn't be cleaned up and redeployed here later.  If we wanted to assure that it was never used on our premises, that we should simply toss it into the dumpster.  Building management didn't seem to want to touch it, but wanted it disposed of to assure that it wouldn't be redeployed here later.  Danny left it where it had been double-bagged up and taged while we waited for the water reservoir to heat up, and when he was satisfied that it had heated properly, he left the old Bunn on the floor and waved good-bye.  

It will probably still be there Monday morning when we come in, and I'll have to get a ticket submitted to have it placed in the dumpster-- not something that the regular building maintenance people do as part of their routine cleaning.  

But at least we'll have coffee.

Hugs,
Dale
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Dale M. Parish
628 Parish RD
Orange TX 77632