The Puddle of Shit Under My House, Codebases, and Mental Health

In January we began to smell a repulsive odor in our house. It smelled very much like sewage. It got worse and worse. Sometimes it was so bad it would wake us up at night.

Sewage smell usually comes from — sewage. Yes, sewage pipes under the house had cracked. Our house is 65 years old, with original cast iron pipes. The sewage leaking out of the corroded, cracked pipes had formed a huge puddle of human waste right under our house. The puddle grew every time we used the bathroom.

The mystery was — why did the smell seem to be coming up from the heating vents in the floor? We soon found out that the ducting which ran under the house was full of holes, probably eaten through by vermin who had entered the area through unpatched openings around the house, and formed a colony. It turns out that much of the ductwork had then fallen down onto the ground directly into the pool of fecal matter. So the ducts were bringing the smell directly into our living room.

We rent this house. After far too long, the owner finally called in a team of plumbers, HVAC experts, and exterminators, some dressed in hazmat suits, who worked for days to fix the problem.

I am reminded of this putrid lake of shit under our house each and every day when I think of the codebases our software engineering colleagues work on every day. The only difference is that that codebase puddles are much larger, much stinkier, and will never be fixed.