Crotchety Joe and the leaky pipe.

I’ve got this friend that lives in an apartment building. The kind that’s got five flights of stairs and no elevator – so of course she lives on the top floor. The building is pretty old, and you can expect it to have some “old building” problems. One of them, apparently, is with the plumbing.

When I heard she had plumbing troubles, my first reaction was, “What’d you do to the toilet?” But it turned out the pipes in the shower were leaking.

Right now, I want to interrupt my story because I’d like to say that the funniest thing you can do after moving your bowels is to walk out of the bathroom and announce, “If anyone’s looking for the prime rib... It’s in there,” and point back over your shoulder with a thumbs up. You can substitute “prime rib” with any food of your choice. Okay, back to the story...

The leaky shower pipe wasn’t causing any problems in her apartment. It was, however, causing a bit of a drip in the apartment below. And the crotchety old man who lived down there wasn’t going to have it. Everytime my friend or her roommate would run the water, Crotchety Joe would bang on his ceiling accusing them of trying to flood him out of his apartment.

I'll admit that a wet patch on your ceiling is a sign of a leak - especially if it's causing some dripping when the people upstairs run the shower, but you've got to be pretty deluded to freak out and believe that they're systematically building up a swell of water that's going to crash down and turn your apartment into an aquarium.

How are the people upstairs supposed to know their shower pipes are leaking? Well, Crotchety Joe's solution was to go up and terrorize them. He banged on the door of my friend's place and demanded they stop trying to flood him out. When my friend opened her door, things got ugly -- there was a shouting match and Crotchety Joe actually PUSHED HER. I can imagine all this happening in slow motion, because it actually was that slow.

Sure, he's old, but he's angry old. And the angry old are scary. What was she supposed to do? Push back? He'd probably shatter his hip, because that's what seems to happen to old people when they get pushed. Or, they die. ...like Mick in Rocky III.

She tried to close the door on him, but Joe wasn't having any of that. He stood there leaning on the door, yelling as dead skin flakes and old man musk dusted the air. But Crotchety Joe was frail, and she was able to calculate and apply the right amount of strength to close the door forcefully, but without sending his skeletal frame hurtling down the hallway.

Poor Crotchety Joe, if he had just called a plumber -- like my friend did -- this whole thing could have been avoided and he would have been kicking back in his recliner eating creamed corn or whatever other soft, mushy foods old people eat.