Plumbers and Harpoons

This Sunday the wife let me know the drain wasn't working very well when she was taking a shower. I decided to put some laundry detergent down the drain and checked it after a while but no increase in drainage occurred. Why detergent? I used to clean the drains in my last residence which had chronic clogging problems with detergent and it usually helped. The next step was to go to the store and get some Drano, and long story short, it didn't work. I noticed after running the water in the kitchen the bathtub in the bathroom, of course, had water in it where as it didn't moments before. This was a disturbing realization as it meant all water would flow backward through the tub drain. Yikes! Also this meant no toilet. 'No toilet' is the key terms that signal when it is time to call a plumber. Surprisingly even in the modern metropolis of Seattle it is very hard to find a plumber on Sunday, and after calling several plumbers, over six, with good reviews on Yelp and no responses we called one of the Plumbers in the yellowpages that stated they were available Sunday. One of the first things the person on the phone said to my wife was that it was going to cost $100 just to come and look at the problem, and after the actual plumber showed up I had to show him where the clean-out was, because he couldn't find it. I was informed that to run a snake would be $477. I had to repeat the amount because I couldn't believe it, but he was there and I wasn't sure that we could get another plumber to show up or that we could go without a toilet for a day, so I gave the 'go head'. Unfortunately I assumed rather erroneously that the $477 included the $100 show up fee and tax, but that wasn't the case. We were harpooned for the gargantuan sum of $630 just to have a plumber run a roto rooter snake down our drain, but wait there's more. The guy who couldn't find the clean out 3' in front of him continued to try to sell a video survey of the drain for an extra $150, or else he couldn't guarantee the clean out. Maybe I don't have to say it, but I passed on the expensive sewer video. On the bright side the plumber did point out a leak in the drain from the kitchen I wasn't aware of. After the Whaler A.K.A. the plumber got in his truck and left I investigated the leak from the kitchen and found it was coming from under the sink. The odd thing was it was a really bad leak but it didn't flow out into the kitchen. Today, Monday, I tackled fixing the kitchen sink leak but found an old galvanized fitting that had corroded away that I was unable to break loose. I did my best to mend the situation and put everything back together. The result is the leak is a much slower drip instead of a flowing stream, and the landlord will be coming by this week to see what he can do.