It's a dirty job but everyone has to do it...

Sewage that is. We have lived in many houses and some of these houses, if not all, had sensitive plumbing, the kind that needed gentle persuasion or the forceful application of sewer rods from time to time. It was always considered a family job (note the pun) and so everyone was roped into helping. One time that I was in charge of looking down a manhole until the rods came into view, I asked who had eaten the sweetcorn as it passed. I was not given this job again. Dad came up with a plan that day that thankfully never was instigated; each family member was to have different coloured toilet paper so the blockage culprit could be easily identified.

In another house, tree roots were breaking up the sewage pipes and things would get tricky from time to time – I was known in the hire shop where you got the sewer rods following repeat rentals, not the kind of recognition a girl likes to have. There was a slope downwards from the house to the septic tank and it was a good distance away. Dad and my brother were down at the tank and I was at house all gloved up driving the rod end of things, my mother was upstairs flushing to toilet on demand. The distance from my position allowed for a kind of delayed ripple effect between pumping the rods and the effect downstream. My brother a very reluctant assistant did nothing but laugh and retreat, Dad would laugh too but drag him back to help, who wants to be alone in a shitty situation? It ended up that my brother and Dad were bending over the open tank peering up the pipe to look for the tree root and to see if the blockage had passed. For the person holding the rods further up the same pipe it was too tempting a predicament (I also have a very dark sense of humour), a short dart on the rods produced a quick squirt down the pipe but with the satellite delay due to the distance between tank and manhole I remained innocent as I was far away from the rods when they jumped back in panic. I assured them I hadn’t touched the rods and apparently I am a convincing liar because they resumed peering up the pipe. I couldn’t resist a second shot, this time I was caught but I only missed them by inches!