plumbing -- the saga continues

some of you may remember the fiasco with the babywipes in sept. of 2008. well the situation came back with a vengeance. someone, who will go unnamed, but is not the writer, put some feminine products in the toilet which caused an unfortunate $800 trip from the plumber.

they dug out tampons and this
about 10 feet of a snake that had been lodged in the pipe for years

2 weeks ago this was taken care of, at least that is what i thought.
i woke up saturday morning to water on the floor in the dining room
it was obvious that the toilet overflowed.

i sent an email to master plumbing the guys who had fixed it 2 weeks earlier:

hi billy,
on 1 feb master plumbing came out and unclogged my main drainage pipe. you may remember, your guys found a huge chunk of a snake that someone had broken off in the pipe. i woke up this morning with water all over my first floor and the basement. i am hoping that you can send someone today. it seems that the original problem is still not fully resolved. i can be reached at 202. . .
thanks
teabelly

i received this response a couple of hours later (completely unedited):

you may need to vidio your line

they worked long and hard on your sewer. We have been closed all week.  You may have a problem
that the vidio can see.. once a sewer is clear someone or something stops it up. We are not open till
monday .  Please feel free to call monday am to discuss

so i called this morning at 8:30am. the first thing billy told me was that they did "don't guarantee main drains, because we aren't responsible for what goes into them" (which he told me a number of times).

i asked him why i hadn't be told this before, either when they came the first time or in the email over the weekend?

he told me it is on the back of my receipt.
i explained that I wondered if after they had pulled out the old snake if maybe the guys just didn't go back and try cleaning the line one more time. i knew that they hadn't allotted as much time at my house and they still had another job to do. my guess is they rushed to get out and forgot to make sure that the line was clear.

Billy even admitted that after two weeks a cleaned drain should not be backed up. When I called his attention to what he was saying and how he was making my case he told me I didn't understand.

so long story short, i called a different plumber. this time her came out but was too scared to go in the crawl space to access the main drain (i am not kidding) so he went through the first floor toilet (not without a lot of drama, because most plumbers don't know how to work with low flow toto toilets, but won't admit it until they have messed something up.

it was a long arduous fight. that ended with the plumber telling me the line had to be video'd so they could see where the problem was. that after about 13 feet, he couldn't get the snake through. though somehow he said he fixed the problem. then we had to haggle over me paying him even tho the job wasn't finished.

it is a policy that no job is paid for until the job is completed. i have learned that the hard way and it just doesn't change for anyone. NO MATTER WHAT! it took a long while, but i just held my ground and he went outside to talk to his manager a number of times but finally agreed.

at any rate. tomorrow morning they are coming back to video the line . . . should be exciting . . . UGH

sometimes i love owning a house, and sometimes it really really sucks. it kinda sucks right now!

to be continued . . .