I suppose just about everything we do at the salon would be considered wet work. As a part of our dress code we're not supposed to wear good shirts. Why? Because good shirts would be ruined from all the water and soap and squirming dogs. But Tuesday night I found myself saddled with a little bit more than usual.
At about 6, I started cleaning up in the back of the salon, back where the big tubs are. We only had one customer the whole day and that was well before I got to work. We did have someone come in for a self-wash (where the customer does the work but uses our tub, shampoo, towels, etc.) and because of that I decided to do a load of laundry so there would be plenty of towels for the morning shift. I gathered them all up, put them in and got that started while I cleaned up everything else.
Half an hour later, I walked out into the grooming area and there was near a half-inch of water on the floor. It had been raining all day so my first thought was that it was some sort of huge leak but there weren't any wet spots on the ceiling. Then I thought maybe the hair trap for the washer had clogged up and the water backed up but there was almost no water in the back by the washer. It was almost entirely limited to the front section where the grooming is done. I found the manager and told him that we were turning into a water park, showed him what was going on and then started cleaning things up.
His main concern was that it was a plumbing leak from one of the bathrooms or maybe something from the aquatics section so he and a few others checked out those possibilities then decided that it had to be coming from somewhere back in the salon. I'd gotten about half of the water cleaned up using the shop-vac and our huge turbo dryer but he told me to stop while he called a plumber. I wanted to keep cleaning, figuring that I'd have to do it eventually anyway, no sense in putting it off.
The plumber showed up around 7:30 and had a look around. Turns out it wasn't a leak at all but either something did on purpose, being mean, or by accident, being stupid. In a normal washer hook-up you've got a little box in the wall behind the washer. Two lines come out of that, one for hot water and one for cold. A third line runs from the washer back into the box into the drain. At the salon it's set up a little different. Our drain line goes through a hair trap to prevent major clogs and that is installed off to the side in a little cabinet. From there it passes into the normal drain further along. In the box behind the washer where the normal drain would be there is just a hole. If you shine a light down there you can see that there clearly is no pipe. You see the drywall from the grooming area.
Someone moved the washer's drain line from the pipe that runs to the hair trap to the hole between the water lines. Now, it's easy to see how that can happen by accident. Somehow the line gets bumped out of the pipe (I have no idea how that would happen but let's say it does). Someone sees the drain line not connected and decides to be helpful and put it back. Not knowing how our plumbing is configured, the person puts the drain line into the hole between the water lines which is how it works in just about every home out there. Yes, it's a stupid mistake but it's an honest one right?
Of course, it's just as easy to see it being done on purpose. Someone gets pissed off at work and knows how our plumbing works. They go back into the wash area, move the line to the hole knowing full well that no one is going to notice the change until the washer is run and drains. Then BAM, the whole grooming area floods.
Personally I didn't think this is the sort of thing someone would do on purpose but the manager that night told me about an earlier incident, well before I started working there. The store sells crickets to feed to reptiles. In the back, they have an entire little breeding area just for crickets, both to sell and to feed the reptiles that WE sell. Obviously crickets have to drink so they had these crystals that they would mix with water to form a gel. Somehow the crickets drank from that. I don't know much about bugs.
Anyway, they had a disgruntled employee. Said employee got the jar of crystals and took it back into the salon, back where we do the washing. They then opened up our hair traps and filled them with those crystals so that when the bathers started washing dogs, the crystals turned into gel and clogged up all the water lines. Now, if someone is crazy enough to do THAT, it's not really that difficult to imagine someone moving the drain lines.
The good news is that since it happened during my shift, it was pretty clear that I wasn't the one who did it. It created a HUGE mess right in the middle of my shift and I'd have to clean it up. In fact, I probably wouldn't have run the wash at all that night so this whole thing would have been discovered by the morning crew on Wednesday (that self-wash guy who used up all the towels saved me a whole mess of stress).
While I was cleaning up, I couldn't help but wonder what had happened. Was it an accident? Did someone do it on purpose? And who was responsible? I haven't noticed anyone who seemed mad enough to pull something like that. I suppose I'll never know unless someone admits making the mistakea and even then I won't find out until at LEAST Friday, when I go back to work.
I'll keep you posted :-)
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My dog did the oddest and coolest thing today. I was peeling potatoes for dinner and the dogs, as usual, were hanging around hoping I'd drop something. Instead, just for fun, I tossed some potato peel to them both. Jack ate his down, reluctantly and Katya ate hers as well and was hoping for some more. Nothing unusual there. She does stuff like that all the time. So, I tossed her another piece. THIS time, she didn't just wolf it down like the first. She actually inspected it a little bit, then held it down with one paw and started nibbling at it. I wasn't sure what she was doing at first but then she stood up and asked for another piece. That's when I saw that she'd actually attempted to PEEL the potato sliver that I gave her. She'd eaten out as much potato as she could and left the peel.
Sometimes she learns things like this and it's just creepy. Cool, but creepy :-)
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