subject: When All Else Fails, Call The Plumber [print this page] Growing up in the home where I did, I thought it was silly and a complete waste of money for anyone to call a plumber. My mom took care of every problem that we had, and if she couldn't fix it, my uncle or my grandpa could. Well, at least that was always the case until one day when we came across a situation that had the whole family completely stumped.
I was still a kid when this happened, but what I remember is that all the plunging in the world seemed to do nothing except for transfer a nasty chunky fluid from one sink in the house to another. We had people with plungers in the kitchen, the utility room, and we even had a person on the roof, but with all our efforts there was no way that we could figure out to solve a problem.
We ended up calling a plumber, and long story short, we discovered that the root of our problem was literally a root.
Living in the great northwest, we had a pretty large abundance of trees in the general vicinity of our home. It turns out that a tree root had actually grown through a pipe that was buried to the side of our house.
This isn't the kind of situation that people face on a regular basis, but trust me, when you're faced with it, you're going to want to fix it fast. It might have taken years for the root to grow through that pipe, but once you know it's there you want to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.
Having been a child when this whole ordeal happened, I don't remember all of the ins and outs of how things got fixed, but I do know that my parents were really stressed out, and that they were very grateful for the plumber that had come to their aid.
Unless you've experienced a situation like this for yourself, it would be hard to understand the relief that my parents felt when everything was fixed and they didn't have to worry about nasty clumpy fluids backing up into their sinks anymore.
My family has been rather blessed because my grandfather has trained my mom and her brothers to fix most almost any situation that comes up around the house, but we definitely still have a healthy level of respect for the plumbers that we call when all else fails. They do the really dirty work so that we don't have to.
