Now I have been having so much fun with the car wash for the
past two months. The sumps have all
started backing up, at first it was one at a time then the whole thing started
acting up. In fact, in the month of
December I have cleared clogs five times.
Now I have explained how much I enjoy working on the sumps
with the smell, the slime, the smell, and the smell. In fact last Sunday I had
the extra fun of teaching Andrew how to clear a clog. What bothered me on Sunday was the fact that
that it was the second time for the Auto bay to clog up in three days. Things
were going from bad to worse for the drainage system. That Monday I called American Sanitation and
tried to set an appointment to get the sumps clean. The answer was “Well maybe, we can get there
by Thursday!” I heard myself saying “That’s cool we get it done when we can”
While my brain was exploding in my skull and leaking out my ears. Luckily we
did not Back up in any of the stalls for the rest of the week. We did not get the cleanout done till Friday,
but boy did those guys earn their pay.
Two guys show up early Friday morning with a large empty Tanker and
started cleaning out the manual bays
These guys worked through the wind, the temperature, and the
smell. I never realized just how much crap comes off cars, trucks, and whatever
else that fits into a wash bay.
Once a bay was clean they opened it up to the customers and
moved on to the next, at least for the first four bays. That’s when they realized that our bays were
so full that their tanker truck would not hold all the crap. They had to leave and dump their tank and
come back for the last three bays.
The last surprise was when they started working on the main
sump. We found that there was a major
clog somewhere in a two foot section of pipe that was deeper in the crap soup
than anyone could or wanted to try to reach. (That included me). This is when the manager came up with the
idea of building up some pressure in the tanker then hit that clog with all
that pressure at once. This sucked the clog out faster than anything. Think of a giant plunger and you might get an
idea of the sound that clog made coming out. Now what was in that clog? well no one will ever know. I like to think it was something dead.
All and all it was well worth all the trouble to get the car
wash back up and running.
