Not Me! Monday

The past few days the bathroom did NOT start smelling badly for no apparent reason. It did NOT begin to smell like sewage in our house. I was NOT on my way out the door to get Drain-O yesterday in hopes of dumping it down the pipes to "Kill bacteria" which were evidently growing and making a stink, when we realized that the smell was not only coming from the upstairs bathroom but also the basement. We did NOT go down there and find the toilet nearly overflowing with toilet stuff, and standing water around the perimeter of the basement. I was NOT extremely thankful that our basement  is unfinished and that the floor is heaved, so the water actually stayed at hte edges. We do NOT have septic backed up into our house. When I wondered why the alarm hadn't let us know there was a problem, I did NOT find the alarm unplugged. The alarm had gone off about two weeks ago, and when we called the septic guy, he did NOT tell us that he didn't know what the alarm was for, and that we should just unplug the alarm. Someone in the family did NOT comply with that erroneous idea. Yesterday I did NOT get ahold of a different septic guy, who told me that the alarm is telling me there is a problem with the pump. Ding, Ding! He gets the genius award. He told me how to *possibly* jog the pump manually into working. It did NOT involve opening up the septic tank and jangling the ropes & chains that are tied to everything down there. Upon opening the septic tank, we did NOT see that our little pond of you-know-what was about five feet deeper than it was supposed to be. And so yesterday I did NOT spend a good portion of my afternoon with my head hanging over the shaft to the septic tank, watching our family's waste slowly recede, after managing to manually kick-start the pump. I did NOT nearly add another kind of waste to the pile while I sat there and got whiff after whiff of that lovely mixture. I did NOT spend the evening laying on the couch, sick to my stomach.