slow leak in the pipes under your building. I was trying to clear a blockage and got called away for an emergency.”
A slow leak.
I asked him to elaborate. And what he told me made me grateful for that terrifying rubber snake.
Apparently, the pipes beneath my apartment had been deteriorating for months. A slow, silent leak had been saturating the soil under the foundation. If it hadn’t been caught, the water could have eroded the ground enough to cause structural settling—cracked walls, warped floors, and eventually, a very expensive foundation repair.
The drain snake wasn’t a prank. It wasn’t negligence. It was a symptom of a much bigger problem that my landlord had been trying to solve while I was gone. He’d snaked the drain, gotten an emergency call, and completely forgotten to retrieve the tool.
That rubber “snake” in my bathtub probably saved me thousands of dollars
