Squirrely

When you've dealt with drain cleaning and drain cleaners for as long as I have, you hear many stories. It's amazing what can find its way into your sewer. Potatoes, toys; once at my Church a candle holder, a flat brass circle about three inches in diameter, was somehow flushed through a toilet and was acting like a butterfly valve, allowing the commode to work only at its whim. Sometimes even animals can get into a line and die. Their bodies swell up and block the drain. It's yucky, to be sure.

Once an old plumber, I'll call him Cloyce just to give him a name, had to deal with a dead squirrel which had plugged a sewer. I won't go into details (remember, there's yucky) but Cloyce worked and worked until he removed unfortunate rodent, by then a member of the choir invisible. Yet his heroics did not satisfy the old woman who owned the house where the chore took place.

"She got mad at me. She was yelling at me!" Cloyce exclaimed to me Pops one day, shock still in his voice. "She didn't want to pay. I said, lady, I didn't put it down there!"

"Well how else did it get in?" she demanded.

"How should I know?" Cloyce barked back at her. "I mighta come in from the city main. It maybe slipped through your downspout and got caught. But I didn't put it there and you owe me for opening your sewer!"

He got paid, but it was an effort. More effort, he told Pops, than the actual work.