I had a rather rambunctious night last night with my friend Jose Cuervo, and ended up making an extended offering to the porcelain god. So extended was my act of worship that I think I killed it.

What does this have to do with you?

Well, when it comes to trying to resurrect your god, especially when you have another kind of offering to give it, Philadelphia’s plumbers are rather indifferent. So we come to the first part of the title: Plumbing.

I called no less than fifteen plumbers in the local area. The best they could do was Monday. Monday. That’s 2.5 days of going from my apartment to Huntsman to use the goddamn toilet. By the tenth plumber I was pretty irate —

“Would you like it if you had a clogged toilet for three days?” I cried. By the fifteenth, I was livid.

“I want my damn toilet repaired, why the hell can’t you spare anyone, are they all on some sort of toilet strike?”

In the end I called a specialty emergency plumbing service. And here we come to the second part of our title. Apoplexy.

He charged me $204.77. To unclog my toilet.

He did something called snaking the drain, which to me sounds rather dirty (in more ways than one). It took seven minutes. That’s $29.25 per minute, or $1755.17 an hour. I was very upset. But I am now considering dropping out of university, declining my job offer and getting my B.P. — Bachelor of Plumbing.

For those wondering, the toilet was indeed resurrected — but they didn’t give a student discount.

So beware — Philadelphia has idiot plumbers who won’t come when needed, unless they can screw you on their charges. Why? Because everybody needs to make sacrifices to the porcelain god.

I never did like organized religion.

Tags: apoplexy, bankruptcy, plumbers, porcelain god

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Higher Education, Philadelphia, West Philly. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.