Snowpocalypse 2021: A Plumber's Story

It is January 2026 and the weather forecasters (both professional and the Instagram kind) are predicating somewhere between 1 inch of snow and full on, Mad-Max style societal breakdown. This seems like an opportune time to cast our minds back to the last great Texas Ice Storm - Winter 2021.

Winter 2021 was a bad one in Austin, TX. One for the history books. Here in our tiny bubble of small consequences, we didn't suffer as much as many people. But this is a blog about semi-humorous/semi-autobiographical anecdotes. So this is what you get...

I’d been discussing my son’s broad career interests with some friends and we agreed that his current fascination with being a plumber should be encouraged. Every family should have a plumber, a mechanic, and an accountant, we agreed. Some families…a lawyer.

A little while later, my friend sent me a text:

The only problem - human poop.

I do love a no-context text like that.

So, the next time I was around a plumber, I decided, I would watch closely. Fate was kind enough to not leave me waiting too long at all.

A few days later, the world around us shut down. For entirely avoidable reasons, the Texas power grid couldn't handle the cold weather we all knew was coming, and millions of people across the state lost power, lost access to fresh food, and then lost access to water.

We were lucky as, at the time, we were renting a house way out of our price range in a nice Austin neighborhood. Safe, secure, but not that close to grocery stores. It had never occurred to us that we'd have to think about walking to the stores in deep snow just to find the shelves bare. My son and I made regular treks to nearby gas stations to see what chocolate and chips options were still available.

Inevitably, a pipe froze in our garage. There was flooding. But, again, we were lucky and escaped the worst of it as the water flooded into the garage and not into our home.

We called our landlords, who call the plumber. And then we waited. Plumbers were in high demand and we had to wait our turn...

When the plumber arrived, he had to turn off the water at the mains, which was located in a hole in the ground in our front yard. As he opened the heavy iron cover, he looked inside and, sounding a tiny bit like Indiana Jones, he muttered, “Roaches. Why does it always have to be roaches?”

I left him to it.

Two minutes later he came around the corner shaking his hand, hard.

“One of them touched me!” he said. He wasn’t wearing gloves and we had no water for him to wash his hands, so I guess he was marked for life. I hoped he wasn’t a shaker of hands. He didn’t look the type.

He looked at our leaky pipe. “You’ll have water in an hour, probably less,” he said with confidence. We were reassured. Despite everything that had happened 2020-2021, we still believed people when they told us stuff.

We’re idiots.

At roughly the hour mark, our plumber was pulling himself up into our garage’s loft area. Halfway in, he muttered, “It smells like rat pee in here.” My wife assured him our recent pest-control guy had told us all signs of rats were very old.

“Nope,” he sighed, and disappeared completely into the hole.

He climbed up there multiple times. Fell out once. Stepped on a rat trap once. Finally, he capped the pipe and dropped back into the garage.

“I hope this is the hardest job you have to do today,” I said.

“If it’s not, I’m going to retire,” he mumbled. He looked approximately 15 years old.

I texted my friend. Human poop is not the worst thing a plumber has to put up with, I said.

By this point, our hero was done. Water was flowing only where it was supposed to. He was duct-taping up the holes in the dry wall.

“That should keep out the rats,” I said, just for something to say.

He stopped and turned around.

“No, not rats. Did you ever see the show ‘One Hundred Ways to Die?’”
I had not.

“I saw on there - someone trapped in a hole with some rats. The rats ate through him to get out of the hole. They will eat through anything…”

A short time later, he was gone. Our hero driving out into the snowpocalypse, spreading plumbing and nightmarish animal images wherever he went. We did not shake hands.