When your bathtub doesn't drain, these are your options.
1. Use drain cleaner (terrible for the environment)
2. Use a drain snake (these have been consistently useless for me)
3. Plunge it (EVEN THIS has problems. my god)
4. Call a plumber or landlord (LOL)
I've lived in a few different apartments and they usually have this design, with an overflow drain on the front of the tub.
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Here's the internal view of how the drain works, plus a helpfully labelled pube clog.
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For my bathtub and the others I've tried a (consumer level) drain snake on, it never fucking works. Based on my experience, the drains have to meet in that T shape because this is what happens:
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If the T joint was rotated 90 degrees in either direction, the snake would be able to get to the clog from at least one of the drains, but plumbers and home designers are too busy sucking and fucking and huffing their shitty apartment paint to care about me or my feelings i guess
The snake is a very rigid coil of metal. It physically can't make it around that kind of bend. It can curve in one direction, it can't do the kind of zig-zag maneuver required to get down there.
Here's what happens if you try to plunge it:
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All the suction from the plunger is just making air get pulled through the overflow drain. When you plunge, if it just feels like you're moving air around, it isn't going to accomplish anything. You need to seal the overflow drain somehow.
If your overflow drain is designed in a way that lets you plug it, then you can just do that and plunging will work as long as the seal in the overflow drain isn't rotted. All the tubs I've seen don't have that though, they are just permanently open. In that case, the best thing to do is to get a plastic container that's the right shape and size and cover the whole overflow drain with it. I use something that used to have some kind of cheese in it I think. Something like a sour cream container or other plastic tupperware type bowl could work as long as its the right size. Bathtubs usually have a little curve to them so this will probably only work with a circular container, not square.
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I would say that this is "kind of sucky" to do. You need to be able to push the tupperware onto the drain hard enough to make a seal AND plunge the bathtub at the same time, but the suction will help the seal if your container has the correct fit.
This method is way faster than using drain cleaner, which sometimes just doesn't work anyway and is really bad for the environment. It's pretty satisfying to plunge it real good and see all the black sludge come up. Be careful plunging, ESPECIALLY if you tried drain cleaner recently. Shit can get splashed onto your face and drain cleaner will just melt your eyeball clean off not even to mention the bacteria
im glad marty did it