Thank Goodness for Small Favors

My cubicle at work is sandwiched between the risk manager and the health and safety guy (with those sickly IT guys off to the other side). As such, I sometimes learn more than I want to about incidents at our facilities. This week, I was lucky NOT to learn the details, at least until the incident was over. On Tuesday, I heard some rumblings about drains backing up, and we couldn't use our sink for the day. The next day, some of the bathrooms were closed. I didn't think that much about it, and I work a short day Wednesday anyway.

But today, I hear risk management guy telling a woman she should just wash the clothes she was wearing, oh, and she might want to run her car through a car wash. Sewage is clearly involved. What?? Turns out there was a raw sewage backup that leaked onto her car. Over the course of several days. Risk guy shows me video- it's LOTS of water dripping on and near her car. THEN he shows me video of the sink in the legal department: it's bubbling over with dark brown water. He says at one point you could see toilet paper in the ooze. There was so much they were squeegeeing it out into the drain in the parking garage.

OMG!!! Luckily, I didn't learn any of this until today, Friday, or I think I would have run screaming out of the building. The woman whose car was involved was amazingly mellow about the whole thing (I guess she's had a while to get used to the idea), and it appears no one involved has gotten sick.

I walked home from work today, and I passed an apartment building with a Rescue Rooter truck outside. It was all I could do to keep from crossing the street.