When I was a young engineer I worked at an old 100+ year old factory. We often had problems with the main sewer drain line that was piped to the street. The ethnic workers had a bad habit of flushing their hair nets down the toilets. As you can imagine, hair nets will catch on ANYTHING that protrudes in the piping. Since the factory had hundreds of yards of obsolete black iron sewer lines, the hair nets would often cause big clogs.

One day we had a MASSIVE clog in the brick-lined sewer line that went 200 feet towards the street. After a couple hours of the hired sewer specialist trying to pump out the clog with one of those unguided high pressure water jet drill bits, they decided to use their last resort..... the "Rat".

The "Rat" was a skinny short guy probably 5 feet tall that might have weighed 100 lbs. While myself and the other plant engineers are still pondering & wondering what special talent this guy has, he struts over to the open sewer manhole which is already wet with the contents of 6 floors above him of backed up sewerage; he places both hands on the edges and jumps in with no eye protection, no mask and regular rubber boots. He grabs the water jet drill and a flashlight from his supervisor and says "Be back in a minute".

God awful sounds of splashing, spraying and swearing is echoing out of the manhole as the "Rat" is slaying a giant pumpkin sized hairnet-infused shit-demon that required two men to hoist out with 6 foot long logging picks.

We stood there in disbelief as the supervisor used the pressure washer to spray the Rat down as he slowly and methodically climbed out. Once out of the manhole, he stripped down to his underwear and put on a fresh set of overalls.

Job Done!

Not ONE of those diversity hires above would EVER do what the Rat did to solve our problem. To this day I have great respect for the man known as "The Rat", who has a lot more guts than me.