So yesterday wasn’t a regular Black Friday for me, it was more of a Frenetic Phone-call Friday. I received more calls that morning than I normally get in a week!
It started at 08:25 when Brad phoned me, though I suppose I’d better give you a bit of background first.
Our septic tank needed emptying. Now I bet that encourages you to read on, eh? Just bear with me, it’s not as grim as it sounds, but listen carefully because I’ll be asking questions later.
A friend of ours, Rod, who is a supposed-to-be-retired builder is good for repairs and solving property related problems. I’d asked him to check out an unpleasant smell which intermittently invades our casita (guest annex). He arrived on Monday. His investigations established nothing of great significance but he needed to check ‘from the other end’ if anything (roots or suchlike) was blocking the pipes exporting waste from the casita bathroom into the septic tank. In order to do this he needed to feed his aquatic telescope through the septic tank but it was pretty full and his telescopic eye could not see its way through all the crap (if you’ll pardon the rather graphic pun) to find where the pipe from the casita emerged. The crux of it is that we needed to have the tank emptied so that he could complete his quest.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find the invoice from the last time we’d had the tank emptied. Now there’s a story in its own right. Let me tell you about it.
The guest toilet in our house, which is the one we use most, wasn’t flushing as well as it should. Despite gallons of bleach and drain cleaner being poured down its throat any clearance was short-lived. So I phoned a friend. Not the same one as the one who was helping me now, I hasten to add, but another one who had done some building work for us.
My friend, who for the sake of anonymity we shall call Albert, came along and established that he first needed to find the arqueta. Okay, okay. It’s Spanish.
Now don’t quote me on this ‘cos I’m no expert, but my understanding is that an arqueta is like a junction box in plumbing, into which the waste from the bath, shower, basin and toilet all feeds before exiting via a single sewage pipe into a septic tank, or wherever.
After much investigation and gnashing of teeth Albert eventually established that the arqueta was under our shower. So he dug up the mosaic floor tiles until he’d exposed enough of a gap to make a hole in the floor and lo and behold, there was the arqueta. But then he needed to find out where all the waste went from there. Using his trusty tape measure he worked out where a pipe should appear on the outside of the house.
There he took up more floor tiles and started to dig a hole. Once the hole was three feet square and almost as deep he concluded that perhaps the pipe did not in fact lead this way. However he did find the location of a water pipe leading into the house, with his pick, so we then had to call out the plumber to repair that.
When I look back on this little episode I cannot figure out what he was trying to achieve by digging that hole. It rather reminds me of a song, Hole in the Ground by Bernard Cribbins.
Perhaps he was trying to find the septic tank. Not having found it he filled in the hole and I went off in search of tiles that now had to be replaced. Have you ever tried matching 10 year old tiles?
I had already been in touch with the previous owner, who’d had the property for nine years, and asked him if he could tell us where exactly the septic tank was. He said he didn’t have a clue as he’d never had it emptied!
We eventually had to call in a drain expert who unblocked the pipe which was at the seat of the trouble and also found the septic tank within minutes of shoving his camera round the bends. The tank lay under the tiled area between the house and the casita. He even pinpointed the exact spot where the access point was – hidden under a single tile. He kindly replaced the tile with a lid which would allow easy access to the tank in future.
Sewage tanker people were contacted and they duly came along and emptied the tank. All that was two years ago.
So now (we’re back to the original story – this reminds me of Ronnie Corbett relating his tales from his armchair!) I was looking for their invoice to give them a call. Naturally it was nowhere to be found. Dear husband said he’d seen a company we had passed many times which did septic tank emptying and described their location. I zapped off in my Renault Kangoo, duly found the place and spoke to a lovely lady who in turn phoned her boss to ask when he could do it. He was working on a job out of town and promised to come around to our place before noon on Wednesday to check out our layout and give me a price, with a view to carrying out the job later that day or the next. I also asked the receptionist roughly how much I might expect it to cost. She said +/- €200. I went home and related this to Ziggy,
“Bloody hell, that’s a bit steep,” he said, “the last time it only cost us €130!
In the event the bossman didn’t pitch, so Ziggy said,
“Why don’t you call the drain expert and ask him the name of the company he put us onto last time?”
I wasn’t hopeful. I had tried to phone this guy before I’d called Rod in but there was no answer from any of his numbers. I figured he’d closed shop. But I said I’d give it a try and this time was answered after two rings! I duly got the phone number.
Now I should mention that this ‘expert’ on his last visit (about the problem we are having now) had told us he didn’t believe the waste from the casita was going into the same septic tank as the house, and that to establish where it did go would need the casita shower digging up. (Not another one! I thought.) Even he said it would be cheaper for us to get a builder in to do this. Instead he simply applied some evilly strong chemicals (licence required) to the drains and hoped that did the trick. Clearly it did not, well not long term anyway.
Fortunately before ripping the shower to bits builder Rod had the insight to apply a high pressure hose down the casita toilet while his assistant, with the aid of a torch, watched for any movement in the contents of the septic tank. Movement there was so it did, in fact, drain into there.
Where was I?
Oh yes, so having got this original septic tank emptier’s phone number I called them. This is where my lack of Spanish reared its ugly head. The guy who answered the phone spoke no English. I did manage to explain that I would get my son to call him.
So I phoned Brad whose is able to converse in Spanish up to a point and asked him to call them to see if they could empty our tank again for the same price as before. Apparently the bloke he spoke to said something about a vacation and gave him another number and said something about mañana. Brad wasn’t sure if he was supposed to call the guy today to have the work done the next day (mañana) or to only phone the next day. We left it.
On Thursday I went back to the offices I’d visited on Monday (like an idiot I hadn’t taken their phone number) to find out when, or if, the boss was planning to grace us with his presence. Another phone call by the receptionist established he would be at our house between 10 and 14:00 on Friday. I also established that he expected his price to be €175. I agreed to await his arrival but this time I picked up one of their business cards bearing a phone number.
Discussing this back home we still weren’t happy about the price, so Ziggy said he’d take the dogs for a work early that day so that he could go to our local town hall (before they closed at 14:00 for the day) to see if they provided a septic tank emptying service. (He lives in a dream-world sometimes!)
They didn’t. But they did give him the name of a man who did. The man had the same surname as the company I had been visiting but Ziggy said that on giving him the number the girl at the town hall had mentioned a company name that sounded familiar, possibly the one who’d emptied our tank before. I conceded that the Spanish are very frugal in their variation of names, be it first or last names, so it was quite possible there was more than one Septic Tank Cleaner-outer with the same name.
[I wonder if there’s a special name for a person or company which empties septic tanks? I can think of one myself but wouldn’t write it down in here!]
Once siesta time was over (14:00 – 17:00, come rain or shine, summer or winter) I phoned Brad again and asked him to call the number Ziggy had obtained. Ten minutes later Brad happily reported that a sewage tanker would be at our property between 10 and 14:00 the next day (Friday) and that the cost would be €130!
I duly phoned the first company and cancelled their appointment, citing the cheaper price elsewhere.
If you’re on the ball you will realise that this has now brought us up to Frenetic Phoning Friday. You remember, I mentioned it about 30 pages back…
Brad called me at 08:25. I’ll be honest with you now, I was still in bed, sipping my mug of tea which Ziggy brings me religiously each morning. He (Brad not Ziggy) had received a call asking for confirmation of our address, but wasn’t sure it was from the people he phoned first or second, and didn’t want two tanks pulling up at our gates. We chatted about it for a while but it got us nowhere.
Half an hour later he called me again saying the bloke in his tanker was querying the address (the name of our lane is not recognised by Google Maps). He said it might be a good idea if I drove up the lane to meet him nearer the main road. No sooner had I finished this conversation and was climbing into my car than my phone rang again.
This time it was a friend (who I’d not met before – don’t ask) confirming our meeting for that lunchtime. Just then the house phone rang. As I tried to cut my friend’s call short Ziggy amazingly went and answered the other one and walking out with that phone and as I was reversing out (if I could get off the phone to drive) I could hear him trying to direct someone to our lane. As he was chatting away he looked up the lane and saw the man he was talking to was about ten metres away walking towards him.
Turned out he was the man with the tanker, except without the tanker. He’d left it at the top of the lane as he wasn’t sure how good the access was. (Bloody hell we’d had removals vans, pneumatic trucks delivering one-ton sacks of wood and cement wagons down this lane, so it could easily handle a piddly-arsed little tanker!)
So I abandoned my car, still trying to finish the call, so that I could go and move some of our outside furniture to give access to a large suction pipe.
Seconds after finishing that chat I got another call, this time from a friend who was supposed to be joining me and my new friend, then the truck arrived…
Peace reigned, though not much quiet, for a while as the man who does shoved his pipe into our septic tank and slurped all the shit emptied it. Once he’d finished, stashed his hose and put the lid back on our tank he produced two invoiced books and asked me whether or not I wanted to pay tax. Ah now, that’s a tough one, let me think…
So I received a plain receipt for the sum of €135 (I wasn’t going to argue over the fiver) and we both ended up happier for the experience.
Less than half an hour later I got a phone call from a man about our septic tank. We had a strange conversation because his English was on a par with my Spanish.
He seemed to be asking me how long the guy had taken to do the job. I told him “hora medio” which in my Spanish meant ‘about half an hour’ but which I just checked and found means ‘average hour’. Seems I should have written “medio hora”. No wonder he’d been a tad confused by my answer.
He tried to confirm our address, which wasn’t easy, but I did the best I could.
Then he asked, “was ours the house with the two dogs?” I told him it was. Being the ferocious guard dogs they are, they had totally ignored the man and his big pipe who had just left, but he had clearly seen our two dogs.
Now you must understand that up until this point I thought he was checking up on the guy who’d done the job. Then he went on to say “tres perros” which I do know means three dogs. It dawned on me when he’d talked about two dogs earlier, what he had actually been saying was “tu perros” which means ‘your dogs’. So where is he now getting three dogs from?
As our convoluted conversation continued I began to realise that he was actually nothing to do with the guy who’d been, he was a guy who was coming. So who the hell was he???
Now I had to try and stop him from pitching up with his tanker.
“No, el septico tank es empty (I didn’t know the Spanish word for empty). Es terminado.”
He was battling to understand me. (Can’t imagine why!)
“Es complete, no necesito para tu.” ‘It’s all done, I don’t need you’ is what I thought I was saying.
He said something else which sounded like he understood I no longer required his services.
“Si, gracias, adios.” I said, and prayed to dog that he comprende’d.
Then I wondered if in fact this had been the bloke who’d quoted the €130, and if so, who the hell had I just paid €135 to for emptying our tank?
I have yet to phone Rod to tell him the septic tank it now ready for his inspection. I’ve had rather enough of the subject to be honest.
But might I suggest, if you should ever be tempted to move to Spain based on the wondrous stories you’ve heard from me, that when you buy a house make sure it is on the mains sewage route.
