The GPST strikes back

In an earlier post, I introduced y’all to my flatmate, the German Poo Shelf Toilet. Like all roomie relationships, it took us a little while to learn each other’s quirks. But over time, we grew used to each other, and settled into a harmonious living arrangement. Or so I thought.

It all started when my washing machine stopped working. Having been away from home every weekend for four weeks straight, I’d gotten a bit behind on laundry, and realising I had about two clean shirts left, I put a load into the machine, got the run started, and went back to making dinner. A few minutes later, I realised that the machine had stalled. There was no water coming into the drum at all.

I called my landlord, who was out of town for the next week or so. Could I possibly hang tight for now and go to a friend’s house or use a laundromat, he asked? I agreed, and hung up.

The next morning, the plot thickened. I went to bid the GPST a good morning, only to find him stone cold and unresponsive. Flushy no worky. Now, I can do without a washing machine for two weeks, but living without a functioning throne is another matter. Clearly, the situation needed to be re-triaged.

Strangely enough, the rest of my waterworks were fully operational. The shower was fine, and my kitchen and bathroom taps flowed per normal. It was only the washing machine and the toilet that had given up the ghost. I called my landlord to let him know that he should send someone around tout suite, but he wasn’t picking up his phone. I didn’t hear from him the rest of the day.

A colleague suggested I call my building’s hausmeister (house master). Most German apartment blocks pay a dude to manage the upkeep of the building, make general repairs and so on. That seemed like a good idea, so I called the hausmeister’s number that was pinned to the noticeboard in my building. The following conversation ensued:

HM: Hello?

Me: Hi, I live in <my address>, are you the hausmeister?

HM: No. Not at the moment.

Me: Oh! I’m so sorry. Can you tell me who I should call, then? I saw your number on the ground in my building. My toilet is not functioning, I need...

HM: No, you called the right person. But I’m not working at the moment, please call again tomorrow.

Me: But… but… my toilet…

HM: Okthxbye. *busy signal*

I might have done better had I been able to speak in English. But I’m not very good at begging and pleading in Deutsch.

Oh, Germany, how thou givest with one hand and takest away with the other! You give me six weeks of vacation and normal working hours, but you give them to my hausmeister as well, thus rendering me helpless to use my dunny.

Suddenly, I wondered whether it had been such a good idea to eat dinner. There had to be a manual workaround, I thought. For the first time in my life, I was compelled to take the lid off my cistern and peer into the cavernous depths of a loo. It was less cavernous, less complicated and less smelly than I feared. For the first time, I understood exactly how a flush mechanism works, and thus figured out “manual flush mode”. Immediate post-dinner crisis averted.

At 2 in the morning, I was awoken by an SMS from my landlord. “Hi Urmila, Got your message,” it read, “Have someone who can repair it tomorrow, need to know when you will be home.” I messaged back to say I would work from home the next day. My landlord fixed up for the plumber to come at 2 in the afternoon.

When my bell rang at 2pm, I buzzed open the front door, and soon heard the familiar crescendo of footsteps and gasps that always accompanies my visitors’ ascent up the five storeys to my apartment. As the footsteps reached my landing, I opened the door to rather an unexpected-looking person.

The man standing at my door was wearing a business shirt, dress pants and shiny black shoes. He also wasn’t carrying any tools. I was confused. This guy was not a plumber, clearly: men in that line of work are not exactly known for their formal professional attire. There’s a reason it’s called a plumber’s crack.

But he seemed to know my name, and mentioned that Michael had sent him, so I bemusedly let him in. Since he was still wheezing like an asthmatic from the climb, I offered him some water. He declined and cut straight to the chase, asking what it was he needed to fix.

At this early stage, it became painfully clear that there was a language barrier. Philip is the only German I have ever met whose English is actually worse than my Deutsch. And obviously, my German vocabulary does not stretch to plumbing. Combining extremely broken and convoluted German with my l33t charades $k1llZ and use of props, I managed to convey the particulars of my current situation.

Philip then spent a quarter of an hour doing all the things I did – peering into dark corners, familiarising himself with the tangle of pipes in the bathroom, turning taps on and off in a variety of combinations. I guess I was being a little harsh, but since he clearly wasn’t dressed for the part of plumber, I had already written him off. “Who is this guy,” I was thinking, “For all I know he’s another software developer. I did all of this already!”

But Philip had more up his sleeve than his dapper appearance would suggest. Clearly he had gathered much more from his fifteen minutes of investigation than I had. He started to struggle with the various valves and faucets in the kitchen, and at one point detached some hollow cylindrical part from the rest of the plumbing, put it to his mouth and exhaled until a bunch of white stuff flew out into the sink. Then he turned the kitchen tap on, and the water ran milky white for several seconds before turning clear again. I was rather impressed. “Kalk,” he said, and just like that, I learned the German word for chalk.

He tried the washing machine again, but to no avail. He struggled valiantly with the Aqua-Stop on the end of the tap connected to the machine, but after presumably decades of being there, it wouldn’t budge. “Do you have any tools?” he asked. I held up the one tool my landlord had in the house, a tiny pair of pliers. He looked amused. “Werkzeug, kein Spielzeug,” he chuckled. “I asked for tools, not for a toy.”

Changing tack, he started to fiddle with the dishwasher. “Oh, no,” I said, assuming my bad German had led him astray, “That’s working just fine, I think. Well, actually, I don’t use it at all, so I’m not really sure.” He tested it by turning it on for a few seconds, and then looked excited. “Did you just say you don’t use the dishwasher?” I nodded. With a triumphant gleam in his eye, he strode back to the wall, unscrewed the dishwasher pipe and the washing machine pipe from their respective taps, and switched them. “Voila!” It was the ultimate dirty hack. The guy just has to be in software, I thought.

Next, he proceeded to the GPST. He took off the cistern cover and poked around in there for a few seconds. He turned the shower and washbasin tap on and off, and fiddled with the taps and pipes that lined the lower part of my bathroom wall. He tut-tutted at how old all the pipes were. It didn’t take him very long to give up. “You really need tools to fix this one,” he said reproachfully, as if I was the one turning up at people’s houses to fix their plumbing without a toolbox. I held up the dinky toy pliers again, and he smiled wryly. “I can come back later with some tools,” he said, “But right now I need to go back to work.”

I knew it! The guy was so not a plumber!

We agreed to meet again in the evening at 7. When he came back, he had tools. The stairs had beaten the crap out of him again. “I could never live here,” he rasped, out of breath but good-natured. He was still wearing the incongruous business attire, but as he held up a wrench in one hand and a new flush mechanism in the other, I suddenly had a little more confidence that he knew what he was doing.

Now properly equipped, my “plumber” came into his element. Philip and the GPST fought a valiant battle. There was lots of creaking (from the pipes) and grunting (from Philip), and I was absolutely glued. Seeing the parts of my toilet come apart and be put back together was quite fascinating.

I never thought I’d compare my job to a plumber’s job, but I was musing as I watched that fixing a toilet is kind of like getting an overloaded online service working properly. The throughput isn’t what you’d like, so you take the system apart, examine each piece in isolation and identify the bottleneck. I guess the other thing that we have in common is that we tend to go to work dressed like bums in comparison to other similarly paid professions (with the exception of Philip, and my university friend Divya, who used to turn up to lectures in business casual).

In the end, my “plumber” chalked up (ha!) a hard-fought but slim victory for the human race. The water was starting to come back into the cistern in a slow, insipid trickle. He looked restrainedly triumphant, but apologetic. “It’s working,” he said, “But your cistern’s going to take an hour to fill up every time.” Better than manual flush mode, I assured him. I thanked him and he took his leave. Soon afterwards I went to the station to catch my train for my weekend trip to Hungary.

Philip had fixed my toilet better than he gave himself credit for. It didn’t take an hour for the cistern to refill – only about ten minutes. In fact, the GPST had gotten such a second wind about refilling its cistern, that when I got back from Budapest early this morning, the cistern water filled half my bathroom floor. Oh brother.

So the besuited plumber and I have another appointment tomorrow night. Let’s see what’s in store after his next visit!