Who Knew a Fork Could Make Me Wonder Woman

After living in my not-so-high-class flat in Dublin for over three months my shower decided to stop draining completely. Let's start off with the fact that my shower has never, not since day one, drained properly. However, in the last 3 weeks it has become much worse. Lately, I've had to turn off the water in the middle of a 10 minute shower to let the water drain down. Otherwise, I'd have a flooded bathroom.

Recently, I complained to my mother, who lives in the US, about this issue. She insisted I talk to my landlord about the slow shower or fix it myself. Knowing how things get 'fixed' around here, I decided I would try to fix the issue myself before inviting the handyman into my apartment.

Being the clean freak, a neat freak, and a germaphobe that I am, I walked around my apartment for 15 minutes trying to figure out what I could safely (safe meaning that I wouldn't have to touch anything) shove down the drain to pull hair out. Unfortunately, I don't have any wire coat hangers here, or the situation would have been easy. There was no way I was going to stick my fingers down the drain, not even with the rubber gloves I didn't have.

My first attempted included a straw from McDonald's which I found in the back of one of the kitchen cabinets. It was wrapped which made me trust touching it and shoving it down the shower drain. However, being a straw, and a bendy one at that, it didn't work very well. I needed something that could grab, and pull hair up the drain tunnel.

I went back into the kitchen and opened up the silver wear drawer. I found a whisk but after five minutes of trying to bend the metal to break off a piece of it, I gave up, throwing it back in the drawer. The knives were too wide to fit down the six little sections of the drain but then I had a new idea. Maybe I could use a fork to pull the drain cover off. I didn't care if I bent the fork. I never use them anyways, since I have my own set of silver wear. With my new shower cleaning weapon I headed to the bathroom.

My drain and the attack method.

It only took two pulls with the fork underneath one of the holes and the middle section of the drain came right out. This was a good start! I'd never seen a drain made like this before but obviously I chose the right tool to combat it with.

At this point, I was already feeling very accomplished.

Here I go! Who knows what I'll find down there...

Now that I had the drain cover off, there was another strange form of plastic in front of me. I was now looking at a cylinder shaped tube-thing which had a propeller-looking hat on top of it. After using the fork to take off the top of the drain cover, I knew what I had to do. I shoved the fork around the propeller-like-thing and pulled it up...and BAM! 

Quite possibly the grossest thing I've ever seen.

I pulled out what looked like a dead animal from my shower drain. It must have been close to a pound of hair because it kept coming up out of the drain canal. I shed, yes, but there is NO WAY all of this was from me after only three months of living here. I quickly scraped the hair off of the fork into my trash bag, gagging the whole time. 

My wonderful multipurpose weapon.

After successfully removing what might as well have been a New York sewer rat from my shower drain, I felt pretty accomplished. Who knew a handy-dandy kitchen utensil could transform a college girl into wonder woman? And for any of you who were wondering, my shower later that morning was wonderful. 

My floodless shower. Perfection.