UAE Day 42: the great flood of 2014

So after the dishwasher debacle, I set about scrubbing my bathroom so that I could shower in the morning in a sanitized loo.  Using copious quantities of bleach, I scoured my walls, bathtub, toilettes  and floor.  LOTS of brown gunk (probably sawdust) came off so it took more than 3 hours to clean.  Then I went to bed, slept for 90 minutes and then took a cold bath.  Of course the hot water heater wasn't working.  So the bath was very short.  Then I made the critical mistake of draining the bath.  The bath water, mixed with all the dirty water from the day the men swished about the saw dust + six years of dirt and then crammed it down the floor drains ALL came up.  At 5 a.m., I had no choice but  to leave the water standing on the floor and go to work.  Ick.  My brand-new bathmats were ruined.  I was cranky and headachy from the lack of sleep and all the stress.  Wrote a nasty email to my apartment management company.  Called.  Hourly.  No Answer.  At 10 am they finally answered and said they saw my email and would forward it to the right department.  Was not a very fun teacher.  So several hours after I got home, they came to service the drains.  At first they said there were rocks in the drains.  I insisted that they do some common acid treatment and after tinkering for a while, they finally agreed.  First, they pumped all the trapped water that had previously washed the floors out of the pipes.  Then they did this acid treatment that snaps, crackles, and pops with puffs of smoke.  Like fireworks fighting grime.  I got them to do it in all my drains.  That made me believe that the problem was solved and I left and slept on a friend's couch to avoid breathing in acid-smoke puffs.  So after waking up the next day and running errands then returning to the apt, I commenced the bleaching-of-all-surfaces, part 2.  Then I filled the tub with water and a quarter bottle of bleach so i could clean that (since it is there that the pumped-water-out-of-drains-that-was-used-to-wash-the-sawdust-into-them went).  I naively pulled the tub plug thinking things would function as they should.  Well, did I think wrong!  This image is the start of the great flood of 2014, part 2.  I called the emergency number for the apts.  After 2 hours, the guy came.  His suggest solution was this:  Madam, you don't need to take showers.  Just use the sink.  I explained once again that I am a crazy american and that we wash ourselves everyday.  Sometimes more than once a day.  And I insisted that the pipes get fixed because drain water should always go down, never never never ever up.  Not exactly how I planned to spend my weekend.  The bright side of not owning a stick of furniture and sleeping on a foam mat is that clean up is manageable-ish.