Posts in category: Drain

I’m the guy who’s responsible for cleaning out all the leaves and dirt from the local streets. You will probably recognise me in my truck, which looks kind of like a garbage truck, with my big sweepers cleaning out the curbs. It’s not a glamorous job but it pays the bills and I take pride in knowing that I’m making the suburbs of Melbourne a cleaner place to live.

Often my job is easy, but there have been a few times when I’ve seen drains that have gone horribly wrong. The grossest stormwater drain I’ve ever seen had all sorts of goo and debris bubbling out of it and into the streets. I felt sick looking at it. Luckily dealing with stuff like that is not my job, and whenever I see anything like that I pass it onto a local drain plumber. Easy.

I don’t know how plumbers deal with stuff like that, day in and day out. Some of the stuff in those drains is so repulsive, it’s enough for anyone to pack up and leave the entire state of Victoria. Seriously. It’s disgusting.

The reason I’m mentioning this now is that it’s very front of mind for me. On my local route the other day I saw the most disgusting drain in my last ten years as a street cleaner. Thankfully when I arrived the drain plumbers were already there fixing the problem and so I could just drive away, but I wasn’t able to escape the smell or mental image. I really am glad that I’m not the person responsible for dealing with the blocked drains around Fairfield, which is where this particular drain was. It’s a lovely part of town, but I still don’t want to go anywhere near the inside of their drains. Even the ones that look clean from the outside. I will be very content sweeping the streets of Melbourne for the rest of my life, from the safety of my truck.

You can tell a lot about a place by how robust the plumbing is. So, so very much. I know this because I come from a long line of plumbers stretching all the way back to the days of Yore. Gore is a period of history that officially extends from the late Medieval period (before that was the Dark Ages) to the late 1700s (that’s when it becomes Yesteryear). That’s right…we were plumbing when plumbing wasn’t even a real thing. Our family has always been extremely progressive.

Unfortunately, we’ve had to move around quite a bit until we finally settled in Melbourne. The sewers of Paris were awful, the plumbing of Istanbul continues to be a joke to this very day, and the drain replacement professionals working in Melbourne are the only ones that meet our extremely lofty standards. Efficient plumbing, pipes and sewer systems are essentially the best way to ascertain the level of advancement of a civilization, so here we are, with quite the beauty of a system of tunnels. Oh, trust me…we ran the taps, flushed the toilets and pressed our ears against the walls in every single home we looked at. A few creaky pipes, but that was the extent of it. We made sure this city was going to be a surefire investment for the future, when we retake our plumbing empire and rule over all life, at least all life that wants hot and cold water when they turn on the tap.

They use drain cameras here, you know. Now THAT is something that they didn’t have back in the days of Yore, and not even Yesteryear. The drain repair guys around here most definitely know their stuff, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to be setting up shop in Melbourne, drain camera inspection capital of the world.

It’s not currently known as that, but once it becomes The City of Plumbing, it’s going to need a catchy subtitle.

-Maluigio