How to unblock drains, Patagonia style.

I can’t believe how many people have read the “Carlos Soria ate my hamster” blog. Literally countless many of them.  I only hope they are not all the legal representatives of litigious South American politicos. It does make me wonder what makes the difference between a popular blog entry and a lame duck. Is it the title, or the first paragraph? Or perhapse I’m being linked to by an influential blogger from the Wall Street Journal or Hamster Monthly. Who knows, or cares? This entry will no doubt get three readers and be forgotten within minutes. Still, I try.

The bloody sewerage thing’s a nightmare. It's a regular occurrence here, but now with a new twist. It used to be that you could phone the water company – you know, the one responsible for maintaining their own drains – and they’d come along with a big smelly rooter truck and unblock your passage for free. Well, free within the context of having to pay a monthly water and sewerage bill.

Most houses have an access chamber in the front garden. You can lever it up and allow a stranger to stare at your loved ones’ bowel movements.  It’s all very personal and debasing.

Anyway, now the water company has suddenly discovered some previously unknown law stating that a backed up access chamber is the responsibility of the home-owner, not the drain owner. This sounds to me like one of those made up laws like buses must be allowed to pull out, no matter how badly driven by a half-blind, chain-smoking ex con; or London cabbies must carry a bale of hay in the boot and talk incomprehensible “mockney” gibberish about how “yewl never beleeeve ooo I ‘ad in ‘ere de uvver day, innit”.

So despite the fact that the blockage is nowhere near my house – I know, because I pushed 15m of thick plastic hose down the drain and under the street without once coming up against any obstacle, fecal or otherwise – the water company won’t touch it. They turned up this morning, took one look, sucked air in through their teeth, shook their heads and did something half-hearted and ineffectual via a drain cover half a block away.

A peeved Mrs Parker strode off to the company’s office in town where they assured her they were simply adhering to a law the rest of the country had been obeying since Darwin first sailed to Patagonia. But perhaps madam would like to employ the services of a private contractor. Certainly madam can be provided with a list of names. 'Ere y’are luv.

Lo and behold, the first name on the list turns out to be the teeth-sucker from this morning. He can come after two, just as soon as he knocks off working for the water company. That’ll be 40 pesos, ma’am. Come again!?

I haven’t yet managed to work out on exactly how many levels I resent this sequence of events.