Stinky Sink Monster

I have been quite happy with my little blue bubble of an office. It is a quiet little space and I have it all to myself. No other people cooking instant noodles on the side of my desk, I don't have to think really loudly to overcome raucous chatter and I can adjust the heat to my liking (for some reason everyone here way overcompensates for the cold weather with the heaters).

Recently however, there has been a malicious odour that has made things less than appealing in this otherwise peaceful room. Today, I took up arms against the stench. Job number 1 was locating the source. After emptying garbages and wiping counters and sweeping out the corners of the room, I found it. There is a sink in the back of the lab that has a weird built in standpipe (effectively an elevated drain that means that water pools in a bowl at the bottom with no way to drain fully). I haven't used this sink myself, but it seems that someone did - a long time ago.

Usually this wouldn't be a problem I don't think, when there is clean freshwater sitting in there. The problem is that the water in there (and coming from every faucet in this delapidated building) comes from a cistern on the roof that is rusting and packed full of all sorts of bacteria (seriously, a cistern... this is a science lab building....). So the water is disgusting to begin with, has been sitting in the bottom of this sink with nowhere to go for a long time now, and since I have been working in here and warming the room up every day the bacteria are in full party mode.

I nabbed a bottle of bleach from a main floor bathroom and armed myself with long tools and thick rubber gloves and took to anihilating the community of slime in the sink. Sadly, I didn't think to take a photo of the black sludge that was coating the underside of the drain cap and the sides of the standpipe, it was quite a sight. I did take a photo of the sink once it was in a more presentable state. Who makes a sink with a fixed standpipe anyway. What a pain that thing was to clean out!


The stink monster now safely dead, I sat back down to work. Unfortunately my mind wandered back to the time when had started working here. The first couple of bright-eyed days when I didn't really understand where I was. Yes, those couple of days before the students had thought to tip me off about the state of the tap water and when I filled my coffee mug directly from the tap.
Ughhh, time to go vomit.