Having six kids means things often go wrong. We are late to pretty much everything, one of them is normally crying and something is always broken. Normally I ignore the broken thing unless it is one of the children directly or something that will end up very costly in the long run. When the older ones started complaining that the toilet was flushing slowly I ignored them. A lot of the time they make things up and I hadn’t noticed any problems with our drains or pipes recently. My husband is fairly useless when it comes to DIY so if something around the house does need seeing to I tend to call in licenced professionals.

A few months after the toilet blockage rumours I started noticing that the kitchen sink drained very slowly. Having so many mouths to feed equals a lot of washing up so for most of the day the kitchen sink is filled with soapy water, it is rare that I even get a minute to stand there while it drains. When I finally did I noticed it was taking a while and so I made the call to the plumber and said I think I have a blocked sewer. Melbourne is a very family friendly city so we spend a lot of time out of the house where they can’t break things that will cost me money. Of course the duty of dealing with the plumber and the blocked sewer fell on me so I arranged for first thing in the morning and my lord am I glad I did! Turns out we need a full on sewer replacement. Melbourne is apparently not used to dealing with quite so much flow through, six baths a night is a lot of pressure on our old system. After some high pressure jet blasting it seems our drains will make it until the replacement can be arranged.

Alright, so the way I understand it, the newest Star Conflicts movie is a prequel, but not THE prequels. Kind of a mid-quel between the prequels and the sequels, which aren’t actually sequels but actually the originals, which are better than the prequels even though they’re really old now. Oh, and there’s also another sequel, which we call a sequel, which is heralding the arrival of two more sequels with another prequel/mid-quel on the way.

Phew. I don’t know if it’s just sci-fi, but all this confuses me to no end. No one ever bothers to explain how things work, what people are doing in the future, how toilet facilities have advanced through the ages…. I mean, what do people in the future do about blocked drains? In Melbourne, it’s a matter of plunger and a mixture of baking soda and vinegar. And then if that doesn’t work, call in the professionals, who’ll discover that the inside of the pipe is corroded and all the rust have built up and is blocking the pipe. That’s very strange to me, personally…I mean, what’s the point of a pipe if rust can build up inside? Who builds a pipe out of material that can rust? This is where plastic really comes in handy, I guess, but who am I to judge.

I bet in the distant future, in a distant galaxy, drain unblocking isn’t a problem. Every pipe will be built with lasers installed, because those movies are all about lasers, and they’ll zap any blockage out of existence. That is, if pipes even exist and water isn’t just beamed directly into the shower. I haven’t seen anyone using teleportation in Star Conflicts, but I bet it’s around there somewhere. Anyway, you’ve got that, and then all the drainage contractors in Melbourne will have moved onto being laser pipe makers because…well, that’s how all jobs work. New technology, new sort of job. Being a drain unblocker might be a lot more fun if you get to work with lasers the whole time!

-Lawrence