Challengers of the Septic

[jayfurr]

We had our septic tank emptied today for the first time since we moved into the house. SIX YEARS we've been in the house, which is longer than most people let their septic tanks go, but on the other hand, ours is a three-bedroom house and there's only two of us living here, so we had capacity to spare.

Carole, who was very curious about the whole thing, stayed home from work in the morning to meet the guy from the septic company. I had a meeting that morning so I went in and called her after the meeting wrapped up to ask how everything was going. She said words that you can't print in a family livejournal and told me that the white plastic cap on the ground near our front steps that we'd been told was the septic tank access was ... not. It was a valve of some kind for the septic tank leach field, not the tank itself. She had NO IDEA where the septic tank cover was, and the guy from the septic service company was, um, "outside digging". NOT what you want to hear.

I came home as soon as I could -- and when I got there it turned out that digging to find the tank cover is actually a fairly common occurrence. The septic company guy had found the tank cover without having to tunnel to China or anything like that. What none of us had expected, though, was that the tank cover was going to turn out to be directly below the front steps to our deck, literally beneath one of the cinder blocks holding up the steps itself.

Perhaps the folks we bought our house from, the ones who told us that the little white valve thingy about five inches across, located about ten feet away from the tank lid, actually thought it was. Perhaps they never went out and watched when the septic tank company was there. Perhaps that's why they built the freakin' steps right on top of the septic tank cover.

But I guess we'll never know.