Mud Cakes and Waste Surprises

All I can say is, "Wow!" This is a little late, but I'd like to write about my extremely crazy, last day of work. I figured this blog could use a little humor...

For those of you who don't know, this summer I worked at Windsor dorms at Purdue all summer painting, cleaning, moving furniture, multching, scrubbing floors, and more! It was a gloomy, cloudy day and I was kind of hoping my last day would be a memorable one. Little did I know just how memorable it was actually going to be!

So me, David Banke$, and Josue were assigned to do window wells that day. What I mean by this is that we had the privilege to remove the uber heavy grates that cover the wells, drop down into the 7 foot deep well, bush off the windows and walls, scoop up any mud or dirt on the well floor, unclog the drains, and then climb out and put the uber heavy grate back on the window well. It's pretty tiring, but kind of interesting. As the morning went on, we came to a window well about 20 feet long where the drains were so clogged that there was about 4 to 5 inches of water in the well. Supposedly, I was the only person with feet small enough to fit in the wading boots and I wear 10 1/2 size shoes!

So I was sent down into that deep, dark, nasty, dirty place and I soon realized that there was at least one inch of pure mud that also covered the ground. Yuk! My boots were making all sorts of disgusting noises as I sloshed around in the well. My plan at first was to unclog the drains and let the water and some of the mud go into the drain. The only problem was that I had to find the drain. After shoveling lots of mud into buckets and handing them to my assistants, I found one! My assistants handed me my weapon-- an oger-- and I started to twist it into the clogged drain. When I pulled the oger out of the drain, the drain burped and mud splashed all over me. I noticed the mud looked so pure and so brown and so slick. I mean, this stuff was seriously water proof! There was no way I was going to unclog this drain! I tried the second drain in the well but it was just as bad and only made me dirtier.

We went to brake and returned with a new weapon: the shop vac--a high powered vacuum. We had to empty the shop vac two times before we could see the mud at the bottom. I started shoveling mud again into buckets and by this time I've got mud up and down my shorts and shirt and all over my arms and on my face. Then it began to thunder. And then, with almost no warning it started to rain. We went inside and I was actually relieved. I needed the brake. But I didn't get it.

Almost immediately after we went inside, one of our fellow workers started yelling that the new bathrooms were overflowing... yes, I said overflowing. As in poop coming out of the drains. And in no time at all, all of us knew that she was telling the truth because the smell hit like a ton of bricks! We all ran to get gloves (just in case) and then ran to the scene. We were all choking and gagging so only me and David and a couple other student workers ended up helping the full timers. A couple times I thought for sure that I was going to puke.

When the whole situation had been brought under control and we had air circulation taking away the fumes, it was lunch time. A few of us were left on poop patrol and we kept an eye on the drains for half an hour. Then we were relieved and went to lunch. After lunch it had fished raining. So we went back to the window wells. Guess what we found! No really, guess! Come on! Fine, I'll tell you: the window well had filled up with twice as much water as there had been earlier. I was kind of bummed. All that hard work for nothing...

So then before we could even start again it started to rain again so our boss told us to forget it. But don't worry! My last day of work ended on a positive note! We were forced to stay inside and work even though they didn't have anything for us to do inside. So they sent us to clean the many storage rooms in the basement of the dorms even though they didn't need it. We ended up exploring some deep, dark passages while we were cleaning and it was really cool. The passages had pipes all over the walls and ceilings and it was really spooky! We found the water heaters that looked like giant atomic bombs and we found an empty room with a random toilet sitting in the middle of the room.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed that! I sure did! I will never forget my last day of work in my summer of 2006! Have fun with school, and homework and projects and all of that good stuff!