Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Plumbing Fail.

It happened a little over a week ago. I got up at 2 am and went to my bathroom to pee. Had I been more awake, I might have noticed the suspicious little wad of paper sitting in the bottom of the toilet, but that didn't happen. Half asleep, I emptied my wine-laden bladder and flushed. Water rushed into the bowl, all appeared normal, and then....

Nothing.

It didn't overflow. It didn't go down. Nothing.

Instantly awake and alarmed because of an irrational fear of plumbing irregularities, I grabbed the plunger and plunged. Twice. Three times.

Nothing.

Tired and irritated, especially because there was no visible reason for this to be occurring, I padded down the hall to the kitchen and grabbed the dish soap. (Every college girl has used this trick at her boyfriend's house at least once, whether she admits it or not.) I squeezed a substantial amount into the bowl and closed the lid, figuring I'd try again in the morning, and went back to bed.

The next morning, I'd forgotten entirely about my middle of the night plumbing woes. I opened the lid and saw the pool of bright red slime coating the mostly-empty bowl. What the.....?

Wait. Dish soap! The bottle sat innocently on the back of the toilet in its unassuming pomegranate glory. Right. Surely this did the trick....I flushed again.

Nothing.

I plunged, to no avail. Now I'm just pissed...which I remembered I still needed to do. I use the girls' bathroom and head back to my room to wake up Sara, who had fallen asleep watching TV in my bed.

"Noooooooo!" she protests.

"Sorry, Kid. You have to get up."

She starts to walk into my bathroom, and I stop her, telling her the toilet is messed up, and to use the other bathroom.

"Yeah. It sounded funny when I flushed it last night," she says.

Wait. What??!

Awesome.

I made several more fruitless attempts at plunging and dish soap application over the next several days. Finally, I bit the bullet and called my sometime-beau and Handler of Household Problems and admitted my toilet was broken.

This was a rather difficult thing for me...for although we have known each other for 9 months and are extremely fond of one another, our relationship is not exactly serious. He has never seen me first thing in the morning...and I would prefer him to think I have no need for a toilet at all, thankyouverymuch...but alas, my standbys had failed me and it was time to call in a professional...and by that, I mean my contractor non-boyfriend (NBF).

"My plumbing is jacked up..." I inform him.

The pause is a long one. "Okay........so, when you say that, what exactly do you mean?" He sounds amused.

"Oh, for heaven's sake! It's not a euphemism!" I explain the series of events that has brought me to this lowly state.

"Have you plunged it?" he asks.

"Come on, Levi! Do you really think I'd be calling you about a clogged toilet if I hadn't already tried plunging it?" I'm getting pretty impatient with him, but he seems to have a point to make, so I cut him a little slack.

"Okay, but when you plunged it, did you really get in there and put a lot of pressure on it and move it around so the pipes rattled when you did it? Or did you just kind of shove it in there and pull it out a few times and it didn't work?"

It was my turn to pause. Surely I've been properly plunging toilets for the past 30 - odd years...right? "I think so......?"

"You think so? Well, did you or didn't you?" Now he sounds impatient.

"I don't know! I'm a girl! No one has ever specifically pulled me aside and taught me how to plunge a toilet, but I've been relatively successful up to now!" I retort.

"Okay.....you may just not be putting enough pressure on it." Is it just me, or does he sound a little condescending now?

"I don't know!! Maybe not!! Are you really telling me I need a boy to come and rattle my pipes properly, because I've been doing it wrong all this time? Like the plumbing equivalent of just lying there?!!"

Clearly, I've frightened him a little, but he laughs anyway and promises he'll bring his tools over tomorrow, including a snake if he needs to use it........................

Still. Not a euphemism.

****Update. I do not, in fact, know how to properly use a plunger. And Levi can be incredibly smug.

2 comments:

  1. I think it just required more pressure when you were working the plunger. That’s why it didn’t work the way you expected it. So, what happened next? Did you and the plumber figure out the problem with your toilet soon after?

    Laverne Knight @ Midland Mechanical, Inc.

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  2. You made me smile. Toilet plumbing problems are embarrassing, agree with you there. I have two little ones and when they blocked the toilet, I had to call in my local plumber to unblock it with the right tools. No amount of plunging was going to save me. Just as well that we can rely on plumbers in a crisis.

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