Dave Barry: Welcome to my plumbing nightmare. That gurgling sound is liquid evil.

Your plumbing hates you. All veteran homeowners know this.

You can’t blame your plumbing for how it feels. Look at how you treat it, in contrast to, say, your electrical system. When you flip a light switch or plug in an appliance, you show a certain respect, because you are always aware, on some level, that electricity can kill you.

You show no such respect for your plumbing. You routinely do hideously disgusting things to it. Your plumbing literally sees your worst side. So it’s always plotting revenge. It bides its time, making its evil plans — those are the gurgling sounds you sometimes hear — waiting for the right moment to strike.

Its favorite time is around holidays, when plumbers are scarce and expensive. So I should not have been surprised when, just before Christmas, our kitchen sink chose to back up. Our plumbing knew this was a bad time for this to happen; it knew we had house guests. It could have caused a toilet to malfunction, but we have more than one toilet. So it shut down the kitchen sink. We have only one kitchen sink.

I first tried the usual homeowner remedy, which is to buy a bottle of lethal chemicals at the supermarket and pour the contents down the drain. The plumbing laughed at me.

“That might work on Arbor Day,” it gurgled. “But this is Christmas.”

So I called our plumbing company, which sent out a man who spent several billable hours attempting to unclog the drain with a plumbing snake. This had no effect.

“Snake, schmake,” the plumbing gurgled.

‘Senior’ plumber takes a shot

At this point, Tom got involved. Tom is the senior man at the plumbing company. And when I say “senior,” I mean he’s in his 90s.

I view this as a good thing. I trust older guys, because they have experience and wisdom and do not become angry when I throw up on them. Here I’m referring specifically to my dentist, Stanley, who is in his mid-80s. I happen to have a very severe gag reflex, which means that Stanley has to work on my mouth like a man defusing a bomb: One wrong move and BLARRRGGGH. Stanley is incredibly patient with me. He’s been working on my teeth for more than three decades, and I don’t think he has ever really gotten a good look at them.

I have never thrown up on Tom, but I seriously considered it when he informed me that, to get access to the problem drainpipe, he needed to bash a hole in our exterior kitchen wall. He did this himself. I hope that when I’m Tom’s age, I can bash through a wall like that. I also hope that, if I do, it will not be my wall.

The plumbing crew went through the hole Tom made and cut a new opening in the drain pipe so they could do some more snaking from there. I was really hoping this would solve the problem.

The plumbing thought it was hilarious.

“You guys!” it gurgled. “With your snakes!”

Uh-oh, this is not good

So now it was time for Tom to have a Serious Talk with me. I had been dreading this. Ours is an older house. It was built in 1953, which archaeologists call the Iron Age because back then home builders used drain pipes made out of cast iron. Cast iron tends to fail over time, so it’s a terrible material to use for plumbing, although there’s a good reason why builders once used it: They knew that by now they’d be dead.

Tom told me, as gently as he could, that they were going to have to start digging up our drain pipe, which is located — talk about bad luck — directly under our house. Specifically it’s under our kitchen, which has a nice new hardwood floor that was installed by a company that, believe me, did not do it for free.

Imagine, for a moment, that you are Michelangelo, and you have just finished painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Now imagine that a guy named Tom informs you that, because the contractor who built the Vatican used the wrong kind of plaster, it is necessary to jackhammer your fresco. Think how upset you’d be, especially not knowing what a jackhammer was because it hadn’t been invented yet.

That’s how I felt when Tom told me they needed to rip up our floor. To make matters worse, I now had to explain the situation to my wife, Michelle. She is very, very fond of our new kitchen floor. I’m not saying she’s more fond of the floor than she is of me. I’m saying it’s a tie.

When I gave Michelle the bad news, she was not receptive. She went so far as to suggest that maybe the drain blockage would go away. I assured her, in the manly tone that we husbands adopt when we are explaining some masculine thing to the little lady, that drain blockages do not simply “go away.” I told her, speaking from the confident perspective of a Man Who Understands How These Things Work, that if she doubted me, she should run the kitchen tap for a while and see what happened. She said she would do just that.

Women ‘have powers’

You of course know what happened. What happened was, the water flowed swiftly down the drain for 15 solid minutes without the slightest backup. Our kitchen sink was suddenly, miraculously healed. It could have drained Lake Michigan. As the water swirled freely down the drain, Michelle looked at me with the traditional expression of a woman whose husband has proved, once again, to be an idiot. Meanwhile the plumbing gurgled with joy. This was the most fun it had ever had.

The next day I called Tom and told him about the drain’s sudden change of heart. He was surprised, but he offered a technical explanation.

“Women,” he said. “They have powers.”

We waited a few days to see if the sink would stop up again, but it didn’t. Tom came out and patched up the hole he had bashed in our kitchen wall. Life in our household went back to normal.

And thus our plumbing drama had a happy ending after all!

I am of course lying. As Shakespeare wrote in the last act of “Romeo and Juliet,” “There are no happy endings, at least none involving cast-iron drain pipe.” Six weeks after the Miracle Drain Healing, our kitchen sink backed up again. This time even Michelle’s powers could not fix it. So Tom had to send a crew out again.

There was some good news. The crew figured out a way to reroute the kitchen drainpipe so it runs outside our house. This meant that we did not have to spend thousands of dollars tearing up our new kitchen floor. Instead we had to spend thousands of dollars tearing up our new patio. But not as many thousands of dollars.

So now our kitchen sink really and truly works. Our homeowner nightmare is finally over. Our household, no longer a construction zone, is a sanctuary once again, a refuge, a place of calm and quiet.

It’s so quiet that late at night, if you listen carefully, you can hear gurgling.