Way Down Below..Farther Even than the Carpet

Today, Ed and I spent the better part of the afternoon in Whatcom County's class on 'How To Inspect Your Own Septic System.'  After all the brouhaha in late 2009 about everyone having to lay out $200-$300 to have a 'professional inspection,' the County revised the law to permit anyone who took the County's class in inspections to do the inspection on his/her own septic system.  We had already had our septic system inspected, but the law requires that it be inspected regularly (every 1 or every 3 years, depending upon the kind of system it is).  So, having taken the class, we could do it ourselves next time.

I know that because I took the class.  But, frankly, I wouldn't, at least not yet, trust me to inspect our septic system.  First of all, you have to be able to take the lid off and it's way too heavy for me to move, so I am stymied at the very first step.

The class, held here in Point Roberts, attracted 60-65 folks, most of them guys, but there were at least a dozen women in the room, as well, most of them of the elderly (like me) class.  I don't know whether any of those other ladies could lift their lids, either.  But it wasn't just the first step that was the problem.  The guy from the County who was explaining to us how to do this work was really very good, but he really didn't expect to be dealing with people like me, people who don't know the first thing about the subject, including the language that one uses to talk about it.  For example, there was much talk of baffles.  I could never quite get it into my mind what he was talking about.  At one point he actually showed me a baffle, pulling it out of a piece of PVC pipe (I do know what PVC pipe is; there's that).  But then, the next time he referred to the baffle and how it needed to be dealt with, I had forgotten about the thing he pulled out of the pipe and that it was called a baffle and thus had no idea what he was talking about.  This was definitely not his fault.  But the class effectively had pre-requisites, classes I had not taken.

It just got worse for me.  By the end of the second hour, when he was warning us about 'ponding' in the drain field, I was not sure whether ponding meant 'ponds of water,' or whether it had some special technical meaning that was obscure to me.  Thus, as Ed learned how to do it, I ended up knowing less than I knew at the beginning.  At least I suspect that at the beginning, I would have been pretty confident that ponding meant water gathering in small ponds.

Now, Ed knows how to do it and we are both certified by having been at the class.  Ed, however, assures me that he will walk me through it with our system so that I will see what it is the instructions were talking about and then my certification will have more content.  That would be good.  I learn that kind of thing better if I'm seeing the real practice.  Otherwise, I'm just likely to hear the word 'baffle' and immediately think of myself as baffled.