Two Hour Waterfall

Well....I knew it was going to happen again at some point.
And yes. Again.
It would happen again.

That I would flood our department once more.
It had been too long since I'd last done it.
And seriously, it's not that hard to do.

Get a little bit of debris in the sink that block the drain.
Leave the water running long enough.
And the water level rises, overflows, heads out to the rest of the store.

Seriously, I was pushing my luck yesterday.
And I feel seriously bad for how much water I unintentionally wasted.
How was I supposed to know though,
That the store would get so busy with time consuming customers?
You can't know. They're hard to predict.
A customer could be a two second customer or an hour customer and you don't know until you start talking to them.

So when I was pulled away from doing my task of gravel vacuuming our set number of tanks for the day.
I didn't think I would be that long.
And it gets very tedious after a bit to have to go into the back to turn off the water, then go back to turn it back on.
So I leave it running,
Mostly because most of the time its faster to just answer the customer's needs/questions and go back to the task then to go walk away from the customer to turn it off, help customer, walk back in to turn it on and then have to start the whole cycle over again when another customer stops you for help.

Still....two hours is a long time to be away from my tasks.
And it was two hours that I was away.
I got stopped by chatty customers, wanting to know every detail about the pets they were going to buy -or tell me all about their pets they already had- and I helped them as much as I could.
Plus I got visited by my brother.
Helped more customers.
And suddenly it was two hours later.

I hadn't thought much about the water running by this point.
Just wanted to get back to actually finishing the vacuuming of the gravel.

Didn't happen.
I turned form one customer to help another -who luckily didn't need help- to see a big puddle of water on the floor.
Oh, I spilt.
Wait.
That's a lot of water.
Seeping underneath the fish tanks.
SHOOT!!
And a mad dash into the back room revealed what I had feared.
The sink overflowing.
Sending water crashing to the ground.
Flowing to the wall of fish tanks.
To the rest of the store!

Why the overflow?
Because some pieces -hay, wood shavings, dirt- left over from that morning, had made their way from wherever they'd been in the sink, to the drain, and clogged it up.
It probably wouldn't have been a big deal if I hadn't just spent the last two hours helping customers.
As usually the job takes no more than like 30 minutes at the most.
Not enough time for the sink to fill up and overflow.

But overflow this did.
So I had to frantically shut off the water,
Unclog the sink so that the water in it could drain.
And then grabbed a broom and set to desperately sweeping the water away from its escape course to the rest of the store, and back to the floor drain nearby.
Ugh.
I probably spent like 20 minutes at least doing that.
Surprise surprise....no customers needed me at all during that time, so that was a blessing.

But boy was it a lot of seeping of water to get the floors just wet and not flooded.
*shakes head*
Oops.

In any case. Crisis diverted.
And the only effect of that little adventure.
Was a very sore arm that needed to be given a nice long stay under a heat pack to relieve the ache that found its way there.

Until you next read these words;
I'll be watching the leaves.
Enjoy the day!

-Sarnic Dirchi