It was the week before Christmas and all through the house, there wasn’t a loo you could use, not even for my spouse …
If there’s a booby award for bad timing, the septic tank at Lush Places now has a damned hat-trick. In the mad week before Christmas, a period in which I rushed about like a man being chased by a bee, a week in which parcels had to be sent out, more presents bought, supplies of food and drink acquired and lawns mowed, the septic tank – hereafter to be known as “that bastard” – decided for the third time since we moved here that it was full again.
It announced this with a weird sound. After I pulled the plug from the kitchen sink after doing the lunch dishes, a noise was heard, one not totally dissimilar to a large man violently burping after chugging down half a dozen beers. “Hell’s bells,” I thought, “that’s not good.”
Running outside like a man now being chased by several bees, I first peered into the wastewater trap. It wasn’t yet overflowing, but I could see dirty water higher than it should be, thus moving the situation from “not good” to “serious”.
Now racing about like a man being chased by a swarm, I grabbed a spade, a crowbar and some gloves from the garage and rushed outside to uncover and then lift the concrete lid on the septic tank. After my eyes stopped watering, I could see the situation had moved from “serious” to “Code Brown”, a state of emergency where you cannot use the toilets, shower, washing machine or dishwasher until the tank has been emptied.
The only upside was that at least we knew what to do in such a crisis because we had been in this situation twice before, including a long weekend three years back.
The most important thing to do, keeping in mind you can pee in the garden, is to set up a small, portable chemical toilet in a sheltered but out-of-the-way spot for number twos. I decided to put our plastic dunny, known since the first Code Brown in 2018 as the “Thunder Box”, in the second-best woodshed. If our dignity was going to die anywhere, it might as well be there, and it soon did for Michele.
Shortly after I reminded her of a scene from The Sopranos in which a hospital-bound Uncle Junior refused to use a bedpan – “I’m not a cat,” he bellows, “I don’t shit in a box” – she found herself out there in the second-best woodshed on a box being watched by two cats.
The second thing you do in a Code Brown is find someone to end it.
But this was December 17, and what do you think the chances are of getting someone to empty your septic tank with just five working days until Christmas? If you guessed “not good”, you’d be bang on.
Getting anybody to do anything in the final week before the Christmas-New Year shutdown is a largely impossible job, as businesses are fully booked. It doesn’t help that, for a large, rural province, Wairarapa seems to have very few businesses in the business of getting rid of your business.
So you can imagine our relief when Glen from Carterton Plumbing pulled up the driveway just two days after the Code Brown was declared in a rig the size of a stock truck, and with a poo tank the size of a car on the back. “Warning: May Contain Politicians’ Promises,” it said on the side. And by the time it left our place, it had 4.4 tonnes of something even worse than those.
As Confucius once said, there are four methods by which we may acquire wisdom: by reflection, which is noblest, by imitation, which is easiest, by experience, which is the bitterest, and by finding you have a full septic tank the week before Christmas, which is the shittiest. I may be making that last one up.
