by Lenzie Avery
During my time at Lovett, there have been a couple of interesting things that have happened. There was the streaker, and the red bull truck, but I never actually saw those. On September 4th, a Thursday, I was finally able to witness something peculiar.
After 3:00, the café is an entirely different place. The middle schoolers are allowed to come in, and they swarm. Sitting outside at one of the blue tables, I was the only upper schooler around.
I wasn’t doing much, just talking on the phone telling my friend how bad my day was, but what happened next made it one of the best days so far.
The only things I observed while sitting at the table were a pack of middle school girls who occasionally shrieked and screamed, and a man with some sort of shovel tool who was pulling out dirt near the ivy lion. I could see him perfectly and was watching him ram the tool into the ground.
I looked away for just a second, I heard a pop and a swish, and then saw that the man had busted a pipe with the shovel tool. About five feet of brown, awful smelling water shot into the man’s face. Surprisingly, all he did was back up and shrug, almost embarrassed that a spout of sewage water just covered him.
It scared me, so I stood up, then sat back down. I could see it, but wasn’t close enough to get wet. I figured I’d stay for a second to see how the guy was going to fix things. Then I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. I felt bad that the “poop” water was probably up his nose and mouth, but who wouldn’t laugh for a second?
The middle schoolers started to laugh, and some started clapping a sarcastic “good job” to the man who was sprayed. But they were about to face a rude awakening.
Soon it got a lot worse. The five-foot spout turned into a twenty-foot upside down sewage waterfall. Screaming broke out and the children ran around in circles trying to get away. Especially the crowd of middle school girls, who had just been drenched by the sewage water.
I ran inside, then realized that I had left my laptop, and all my books outside. I had left them in the line of sewer spray. So I had to turn back.
Luckily nothing had any water on it. I watched from a safe distance inside the café, and noticed that the middle school girls didn’t really do much about what just happened. They laughed for a second, and moved away. For some reason they didn’t take the fact that they smelled of other people’s wastes to heart.
Then for about forty-five minutes I ran around trying to find some one to tell the story to. There was no one but middle schoolers in the café; some had even run out to see what happened. Only a couple of people had heard about it, and most of them had just noticed the stench after the explosion.
But I think the best part about this was when I actually talked to some of the middle school girls. They were all crammed into one section of the girls locker room when I asked them if they were there.
One girl said it hit the back of her legs. When I said “Oh, that stinks,” (yeah, the pun’s intended) one girl didn’t really understand what I was getting at.
“It’s no big deal,” she said. “It was sprinkler water.” I found this incredibly amusing, and then asked her if she actually smelt the water or even looked at it. “Because it was dark brown, and it reeked,” I told her.
Senior Jeff Jackson says his middle school sister came home with a soaked book bag. “She said she thought it was mud water,” he says. “And I was like no, that is in no way mud water.”
The day after, I walked by to see if things had been cleaned up. The smell was gone, but the brick ground was stained. There was a huge sign showing the plans for the new middle school, and one of the wooden poles was shoved into the ground close to the hole where the pipe exploded.
After I saw this, I felt sorry for the man and the middle school girls. He was simply doing his job, and they were simply gossiping. And it all ended in a pandemonium of people running from a doo-doo geyser. So much chaos, for one sign.
