Miss Range...with a lead pipe...in the kitchen

Freshman year in the USC dorms, Friday the 13th of October. The sink in our kitchenette clogs, someone turns on the disposal, and a cloud of dark black oily liquid gurgles up from the drain, like squid ink. We were a bunch of 18 year old girls who, while quite capable in many respects, were not really experience plumbers, but we did manage to bucket out the black water and dump it in one of the two communal showers (I know, gross.) As we sloshed from the kitchenette to the showers, we realized that it was not only black and oily, but had a putrid, pungent smell not unlike rancid tofu. It was past 5, when the maintenence guys had already gone home for the weekend, and there we were in our dorm, an unknown substance gurgling up in spurts from the drain in a spring of glossy ooze. It gurgled to a slow halt as we kept our eye on it, and we slept in peace that night, from what I recall. The next day, a USC football game, I was alone in the dorm studying at the table in the common area when I heard a splash! and looked up to see a sheet of water spilling over the sink's edge into a lovely muddy puddle on the floor. I lept up, tied a bandana around my hair, and retrieved our bucket. It stopped of its own accord after a few hauls back to the common shower area. The next Monday, a man came and knocked a hole in our bathroom to fix the pipes. I still have no idea what the black ooze was.

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Yesterday I came into my apartment after Bible Study, dumped my purse on the bed and went to the kitchen for a drink. There was about an inch of water standing in my sink. The faucet has had a steady drip for a while, but it had never clogged before, not like this. I looked underneath. The seams of the pipe were dripping. I sponged out the water in the sink and dumped it down another drain. We tightened and loosened the seams, and the water just kept rushing out--the sink water level never changed. The Manly Man and the handyman came determined that this was not a problem with my drain, but with the pipe system in general: my first floor apartment was the lucky recipient of waste water that couldn't drain properly because of a clog somewhere else in the system. Turns out that the apartment next to mine experienced the same problem. In other words, the water that was threatening to flood my kitchen was not my water. It was OTHER PEOPLE'S WASTE WATER just looking for a way out. Beautiful.

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One day soon after I returned from Egypt last October, I was standing at the sink doing my dishes and minding my own business when I looked down to see that I had a fat, hairy visitor: one of Dupont's resident rodents had moved in while I was away. (S)he was quite at home on my yellow floor, and looked startled when she realized that she was not the only tenant in this studio. She bolted behind the oven. I bolted to the phone to call my landlord. I then moved to a friend's apartment because NO WAY WAS I SLEEPING IN THE SAME APARTMENT AS A BIG FILTHY RAT, EW, WHAT IF HE CRAWLED INTO MY BED OR SOMETHING, EW EW EW GROSS.

After a few days tempting her with peanut butter on unset rat traps, to lull her into a false sense of security, we set the traps. The next evening, a Friday, I opened the door to see...a bleeding rat. In my kitchen. I closed the door without moving an inch, went to the front desk and left a note saying something to the tune of, "There is a rat who may or may not be dying/dead in my apartment. If the maintenance guy is around, could you please have him look after that?"

The next day, Saturday at 11 AM, I came back to a laughing front desk clerk who thought that I probably was exagerrating and the rat was probably dead, and was I even sure that it was a rat? Mice can get pretty big, you know. We opened the door, and there she was, with her beady bright eyes, nursing her injured paw in my foyer. The desk clerk thought this was hysterical and screeched with a mixture of disgust and delight. We couldn't trap her with a box and broom, and only succeeded in scaring her to seek refuge under my chair (EW EW EW) so that night we set more traps. The next afternoon, I was greeted with a truly dead rat. The landlord took her away so I didn't have to witness the carnage. There had been, he told me, construction in the basement, leaving a small hole(s) through which the rat had probably discovered my cozy, warm, person-less apartment.

I spent the next 24 hours bathing my studio in bleach and vinegar. I think I dry cleaned every item of clothing I owned. My dishes had never been so clean, my wood floors had neevr gleamed with such precision. I cursed the cumbersome 1950s oven that was stuck to the wall, preventing me from cleaning between the wall and the cupboards.

The moral of the story: Never buy a first floor condo. Let someone else deal with the ooze and the pipes and the rats.