This story takes place at work and involves someone I have mentioned in earlier comments: a young fat kid with a greasy face and a whistling nose hair. Apparently, one day I inadvertently made a loud comment about the smell of his "daily product", which caused him a great deal of embarrassment. In an effort to make peace with him, I invited him to have lunch at our local seafood palace, on me.
As he drove us to lunch, I was noticing that almost every house we passed had an oil barrel either in the backyard or right up beside the house. I knew it was oil because of the little copper tube that ran from the spigot on the barrel into the house through a hole in the wall. I made some comment about oil being the most popular method of heating, from the looks of it. Right away Nosehair bristled up and informed me that they were NOT oil barrels -- they were aboveground septic tanks.
"Get outta town," says I, thinking he was pulling my leg.
"No, I'm serious!" he repeats. "They are aboveground septic tanks."
So I say, "Well, there's only one tube on the barrel and it's about a half-inch around. How does the shit get up that little tube -- and why would anyone have a tank full of shit sitting six feet off the ground right beside their house?"
"I don't know," he answers, "but it has something to do with a vacuum. They have to have it because of something to do with the height of the water table on this island."
My mind was completely blown by this time. I asked him how the shit got back out of the tank. So he tells me people have to have them pumped out every other month or so, depending on how many shitters there are in the family and how often each of them shits.
The subject of the shit tanks was the whole topic of conversation all the way through lunch. By the time we arrived back at the lab, I was absolutely insane trying to convince Nosehair that, while I didn't know where the shit went when islanders flush, I was entirely certain that it did not go up a little copper tube into a two-hundred-gallon barrel six feet off the ground.
Now, as it happened, another kid at work just happened to be the son of a man who owned a plumbing company, which also happened to have several of those big pumper trucks that emptied septic tanks. Their company motto was neatly painted on each side of the truck. It said, "We make your business our business." So I grabbed him aside and told him about Nosehair and the aboveground septic tanks.
After he finally stopped rolling around the floor laughing, he stood up, brushed himself off, and said, "Carolyn, there are two basic rules in the plumbing business: one is 'hot on the left and cold on the right', and the other one is 'shit flows downhill.'"
