My bathroom sink blew up in my face.

It’s blown up before, but not while I was home, much less looking at it saying to myself, “What’s that noise?”

BLORP!

That’s the noise it made. B-L-O-R-P. All capitals.

Before today, I didn’t know why, once every few months, I would come home to find dingy water stains and bits of mildew all around the sink, and the drain stopper rolling around on the counter or the floor. To finally answer this divine mystery, God sent the plumber with his compressed air gun to the neighbor’s apartment while I was getting ready for work on Tuesday morning.

I forget exactly what I was doing looking at the bathroom mirror; I may have been brushing my teeth, checking for stray facial hair, or generally just admiring my bad self. Then there was a brief gurgle from the drain, followed immediately by a full scale BLORP of stagnant water, bits of hair, and drain mold.

Apparently the plumber didn’t hear me scream like a little girl through the walls, because he fired two more shots of compressed air into the pipes, shooting out more water and even blowing out the drain cover in the shower. (Note: I didn’t scream like a little girl. It was more of an “AAAA!” than an “EEEEE!”)

I stepped back and sat down on the toilet seat, then, thinking better of it, stood right back up in fear. I was wet and covered in flecks of grime. I took some consolation in knowing that while our sinks and showers drain from the same pipe, the toilet is on a completely different pipe. Thus, whatever came out of that drain was mostly pipe grunge and not, you know, people grunge.

In a way, I felt like it was my fault. I wanted so badly to know why it looked like our sink blew up every few months. This was the punishment I got for questioning the power of plumbing. Still, who the hell connects pipes like this?

SPLOOSH!