We had a little ‘incident’ here last Thursday.

Our village public works department decided to ‘water jet’ the sanitary sewers for preventative maintenance. Basically, the task involves using a truck to pump water at very high pressures through a municipality’s sewage systems, to prevent blockages from developing in the sanitary sewers.

If you, Oh Best Beloved, haven’t ever heard of water jetting, I have one piece of advice:

Be afraid. Be very afraid if your municipality decides to buy this type of equipment.

Visualize this scene:

Michael and I were in our kitchen, enjoying a late lunch when we heard a gurgle coming from our pipes… a distinctive gurgle… the gurgle that says our normally sane municipality has hauled out the “water jetting” equipment and failed to contact us, as they had promised, after we had problems LAST time they water jetted.

See our horrified expressions? No? Well, trust me. We had horrified expressions, the type of expression Indiana Jones has when he drops into a snake pit.

Now, visualize Michael as he ran frantically down the hallway to our bathroom, because from past experiences we know that:

Satan has taken possession of our toilet.

Yep. We needed a toilet exorcist, because water was shooting straight up, in a demonic swirling geyser - and it wasn’t clean tap water.

Being an intrepid soul, Michel did what I did last time our village helpfully jetted the sewers: slammed the lid on the toilet.

So, we had Michael holding down the toilet lid, with water (laced with you-know-what) boiling out around the edges of the toilet seat.

*AAAIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!*

As I frantically dialed the village’s public works department to tell them to shut the freakin’ equipment off, Michael lunged across the bathroom (leaving one hand holding down the toilet lid), grabbed a toilet plunger we own, whipped up the toilet seat and slammed the plunger into the toilet, blocking the outlet-turned-inlet.

Result: Michael, feet braced, leaning with considerable force into the toilet, became the living plug in the sewage dike. The sewage, not to be thwarted, blew the drain cover up in the bathtub and spewed all over inside the tub.

At least I got through to the work crew and got them to turn the equipment off well before the bathtub overflowed…

Oh, yeah, this was just SO what we needed in our lives.

*Sigh.*

The village says that they’ll try to remember to call us when they do this again (Again? AGAIN?!) in two years and use ‘lower’ power in our section of the village.

Right.

Like that’s happened the last three times they did this — with the same results in not only our house but other homes.

We spent the afternoon and a large part of the evening cleaning then disinfecting our entire bathroom.

Talk about sh– happens…