In our house, whenever the seven of us get together, one of us is always going to do something stupid. It never fails. No matter what we are doing, no matter how hard we try, it is inevitable that one of us will screw something up.
If we are eating or drinking, something spills all over the floor or someone's clothes; if we are watching TV, someone will trip over a chord, make our old television break and probably spill something; and if we have a girl over, one of us will reveal a secret we know about the girl and ruin the night.
Usually it's the same person - not always, I would not want to say anything I could not back up. But always, somebody does something stupid.
The other day, we decided that after weeks living in our house, we needed to clean the basement. Even in the middle the day this was difficult, because there aren't really any windows and our light bulbs blow out after two days. It's really quite ridiculous. I think we spend more money on light bulbs than beer.
Our basement was a mess. I'm not just talking about the amount of crap that we keep down there - an extra washer and dryer, various things we stole throughout the years, people's clothes, boxes, old nasty things that they left over the summer, beer cans.
It was also jam packed with stuff that was left in or attached to the house. Wooden tables and work benches, broken light bulbs of course, years worth of dryer lint, fertilizer, wood, you name it. If someone had lit a match, it would have been Triangle Shirtwaist all over again.
Furthermore, I don't know what brilliant architect designed our house, but I am pretty sure I could have done a better job. In the basement, there are pipes and pieces of wood aimlessly hanging from the ceiling, holes in the floor, purposeless nooks and shelves, and lots of light sockets that do not work. The light switches are randomly thrown about the room, on ceilings and walls, and while some turn on things on the other side of the room, most do nothing whatsoever.
While we were moving things around and throwing stuff out, someone saw one of the random pieces of wood coming out of the ceiling. We discussed what it was for and whether we needed it. The answer really was no, but it wasn't in the way of anything either.
One of our housemates, this time not Ned, dashed up stairs. I thought the conversation about the wood was over and went back to picking up eight years worth of trash from our dirt floor. But seconds later, the housemate, we'll call him Bob the Builder, came sprinting down the stairs, hammer in hand. Without saying a word, he started banging the wood. We all stared, knowing something was going to happen. This couldn't go smoothly.
"Watch out for the pipe!" someone yelled. Too late.
As soon as that person spoke the warning, Bob missed. Splash, or whatever the sound hundreds of gallons of water makes as it screams out of a pipe and hits a basement floor. Of course.
Bob and most of the other housemates ran for cover. I stood where I was, in a dry spot, shaking my head. I knew this was going to happen, and I was pissed.
After about a minute of all of us yelling at Bob, we decided to try and stop the waterfall. We scrambled all around the room looking for the shut off valve. We must have twisted twenty valves, none of which shut off the water. We put one of those plastic, twenty gallon buckets under the leak, if you can call it that. It filled up in about four minutes.
Finally, probably a hundred gallons of water later, we found the shut off valve in the way back corner of our basement, behind the oil tank, the most inconvenient spot, and turned off the indoor geyser.
The room was soaked. The floors and carpets we had put down were saturated, the stuff we hadn't managed to move out of the way was ruined, and we were all more than angry at Bob the Builder, still holding his hammer.
We called our landlord (but didn't tell him how it happened), and the plumber, who actually came over very quickly. We borrowed a shop vacuum from a construction site and made Bob clean up the puddles while we watched "Next" upstairs.
When the plumber came and tried to fix our busted pipe, he told us that whoever built the house had cut a bunch of corners. I guess they soldered the pipes wrong, and some other stuff that only the engineers in my house understood.
The basement eventually dried, but seriously, if you come over, be prepared for something dumb to happen, and for all of us to yell at whoever did it for hours.Dan Tovrov is a junior majoring in English. You can reach him at daniel.tovrov at tufts.edu.
Dan Tovrov is a junior majoring in English. You can reach him at daniel.tovrov at tufts.edu.
