Flubbing, Flubbing, Flubbing

On board Navy vessels, casualty situations are announced over a PA system. This isn't a Bose quality system, so sound quality sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. The people making the announcements are rarely professional voice artists, and they are often rushed and full of adrenaline.

That results in announcements sounding much different than the alarm you know is being sounded. My favorite was always flooding. This casualty is sounded when water is entering a space faster than available systems can evacuate that water. When called in, the announcement is always made by repeating it three times. Due to the quality of the overall system, "Flooding, flooding, flooding" often came across as "Flubbing, flubbing, flubbing."

That was the call I got from Mrs. Pol, yesterday. She had gone into the basement to get some things before leaving the house, only to find several areas with standing water. She called me, and we were able to isolate the cause of the problem. The dreaded sump pump failure. (For those unfamiliar with basements, a sump is an area designed to collect water that would otherwise leak into the basement. A sump pump clears water from the sump to somewhere outside the house.)

Sadly, this sump pump failure was more human in nature. Specifically, it was a human from the genus "Furnace Technicianis Forgetfullus." Simply put, a service rep unplugged our sump pump and forgot to plug it back in when he finished his work. Net result, lots of water in my basement.

We were actually lucky. First, Mrs. Pol found it early. The potential for serious damage was pretty high. Second, we don't have a lot of valuable items sitting directly on the floor. The worst damage was to some old magazines and some clothes that haven't seen the light of day in a decade.

Cleanup is another story. Training last night was wiped out by hours spent cleaning up water and damaged or wet items. Our server and computer had to be taken apart, dried, and reassembled. Items in wet boxes had to be transferred to new storage containers. And fans had to be set up to help everything dry out. We were up until well after midnight doing that.

And that pretty well wiped out training for this morning, as well. I threw my bag in the car and hope to get my swim in on the way home. We'll see how things go.

Spring is usually a boon for training. The snow is gone. Freezing temperatures give way to the cool days that are so perfect for training outside. Then again, all the water has to go somewhere. And sometimes, "somewhere" happens to be inconvenient.