Tag Archives: The Three Rules of Plumbing

Mark’s Dirty Movie

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The Three Rules of Plumbing

  1. Sh!t flows downhill
  2. Never chew your fingernails
  3. Payday’s on Friday

Mark’s Dirty Movie

Earlier this week, we got some bad news. Following advice from the city inspector, we hired a local plumbing company to TV camera our interior sewer line. The owner lives on our street. The inspector had TV camera the exterior portion of the sewer line and the only bad thing he had found was that Roto-Rooter had not done a very good job, when they had cleaned out the main line last month. This observation only served to foster false hope. The new plumber found several large holes in the cast iron, beneath our basement.

They are formulating a bid and we’ll seek others too, but the long and the short of it is that we’ll soon be throwing a whole lot of money down the drain, literally. Our house is seventy-five years old and so are the pipes below it. We’ve wrestled with them over the years, but now it is time to send them to the bench and bring in some relief. How did that baseball metaphor sneak in here? Work could commence as early as a week from tomorrow. Starting on a Monday, it will be done by Friday, with only a brief interruption in service. We were promised a lot of smell though. I hope that it will be warm enough to open the windows. In the picture and the movie, upper right is down and lower left is up. Don’t forget to say hello to the spider in the video. The three rules will never be more true than here.

Direction of Flow

Posted on by
2

The Three Rules of Plumbing

  1. Sh!t flows downhill
  2. Never chew your fingernails
  3. Payday’s on Friday

Direction of Flow

I’m not a Sanitary Engineer, like my Grandfather joked that he was, and I’m not a Hydrology Engineer, like my SIL [Anne’s acronym], Jay, but I do believe that this sewer grate violates the first rule of plumbing. Maybe it doesn’t really matter, because you can see the river while standing on it. However, my wife, the former Environmental Engineer, might object having this sewer’s flow passing directly into the Mississippi. I’m guessing that her objection would broadly fall under the second rule of plumbing? Anyway, on Saturday, Anne kicked this decision over to her sister, my SIL. So Jay, which way is the correct direction of flow?

Like his father before him, my father is an engineer. My Dad graduated from Annapolis. He rebuilt aircraft carriers. He left military service with a PhD in Mechanical Engineering. He followed that up with a PhD in Biomedical Engineering. His study culminated in the patenting of a medical device, the third rule of plumbing realized.

Like my father before me, I am a Jedi engineer. I am a third generation engineer. I started out as a Computer Scientist, albeit in the school of engineering. I tried to become an Automotive Engineer, but found that line of work was not for me. I’ve ended up an Electrical Engineer, which in some engineering schools is a close cousin to Computer Science. I’ve always found this transition strange, but it works. 

One of my sons is an artist and one of my sons is an engineer. I feel like the father of renaissance men. Dave, is the fourth generation engineer in the family, another Biomedical Engineer. I hope that he doesn’t feel that the weight of history, or the first rule of plumbing weighs too heavily upon him. I know that I chew my fingernails way too much. All this engineer crap is in honor of National Engineers Week. So honor your own favorite engineer, turn on a light, turn on a faucet, turn on your iPhone, start your car, feel free to fly about the country, say thanks for your very life, say thanks to an engineer. We earn it every Friday.

This final item is offered up by way of a postscript. Today, Dave flies to San Diego to attend a research conference. Purdue is covering his expenses. He plans on having lunch with his Rochester advisor.