Toilet Bowl Blunders
In researching images for this article, I stumbled upon this jewel of the internet called "Adventures in Toilet Flushing." http://m.pandawhale.com/post/6374/adventures-in-toilet-flushing This website left me howling with laughter and tears streaming down my cheeks. After this highly scientific video evidence, I have concluded...I bought the WRONG toilet. This also includes the cartoon from my youth that leaps to mind every time I have to rigorously plunge.

I reseated my toilet for the third time since the dawning of this new year. I am starting to wonder if I shouldn't get a contractor's discount and just buy wax ring kits in bulk, because we have to completely dismantle the commode on a fairly regular basis in search of whatever object has blocked the escaping of unwanted materials. Unfortunately, the culprit is usually not of an organic nature. I would like to be able to accuse our toilet woes on overenthusiastic wipers, but alas some children need to be reminded to perform that operation altogether, and others of them choose to bypass taking it off the roll in double ply streamers and just drop the unused cylinders in whole.

I have had three different mothers this week pose the inexplicable question of where the spoons from their homes went. One mother actually wondered if they went the same place that single socks do. I do not really venture to guess where spoons go when they disappear from this realm of existence, but I will tell you that this most recent occurrence, when the toilet vomited its undesirable contents all over the floor, a lone spoon sat glimmering in the depths— daring my germophobic self to extricate it from the murky waters. I plucked it like a hot coal from its odorous resting place and flung it into the bathtub behind me. I covered the offending utensil in bleach, cleansed it with scalding hot water, and threw it in the garbage just to be safe. If you also are finding a notable lack of food-shoveling implements, perhaps you should check the plumbing.

Our toilet began protesting our family's abuses about two years ago when the first IFO (identifiable flushed object) strangled our plumbing. Due to chronic skin maladies and my unhealthy obsessive need for overachieving, I have always made my own soap from scratch. Yes, I know....totally weird, but decadent and effective. During one of my frequent bouts of being overextended and exhausted, I chose to buy a case of green-hued soap that claimed, once upon a time on television, to make Irish people sing under waterfalls. My eldest minion is very particular about....well....everything. I unsheathed the rectangle of emerald perfumey goodness and placed it gingerly on the dish built into our tub. When I went to shower, the rectangle was inexplicably missing. So, I unwrapped another and placed it in its place of honor. The next day it also had been sucked into a vacuum. On my third attempt, my toilet began mysteriously cascading over the shiny barriers of the rim. I plunged until I could plunge no more. I purchased a toilet snake (I had never heard of such a thing before), but to no avail. I finally hired a plumber. He removed my toilet and retrieved from the depths beneath my tile, a vaguely rectangular not exactly green object that I recognized immediately. I was amazed. Apparently soap gets gummy and squishy during a ten minute shower, but can last several days under a constant barrage of flushing without softening or passing through to freedom.

 

I was comforted a few short weeks later when my dear neighbor called and reported that her porcelain throne had suffered a similar fate. Her well-intentioned, but bored, seven-year-old child had decided to play “flush the Hotwheels car.” Apparently Hotwheels made their cars wonderfully flushable, but not parentally steppable (see our January 9, 2013 post about Parental Pain Scales.) After exhausting his die-cast supply of vehicles he decided that writing implements seemed innocuous enough to make the journey through the pipes. After flushing one plastic pen, the toilet gave up the battle and began its watery protest. When confronted about the incident, the child responded with “It said it was disposable on the side.” His mother, though slightly soggy, had to accept that as a relatively logical defense.

So, I now begin listing things that through my scientific study and a plethora of rubber gloves and hand sanitizer I have found to be non-flushable. (How is it that non-flushable is rejected by my spell-check, but non-uncrushable is an acceptable replacement?) Toilet paper rolls if stocked with more than a quarter of a roll of product are rejected by most lavatories. Marbles though small, are too dense to be carried away with the current and then either sit glinting and decorative in the bottom of the privy or require unpleasant retrieval by someone other than myself. Toothbrushes make about half the journey before proving too rigid and may take some muscle to extract. Baby wipes, single paper towels, plastic Easter eggs, make-up brushes, cotton swabs, toothpicks, marshmallows in small groups are all fairly benign in descending down the catacombs of the W.C. Don't ask me how I know, but through familial proof, dentures are amazingly flushable and truly difficult to retrieve. (The family resemblance is extremely shaky after that, as the wearer of these chompers washed them and continued using them after sending her hubby to retrieve them from the septic system. I may be frugal, but I don't think even I am that frugal. The moral of this crappy tale is to remove your dentures BEFORE you toss your cookies).

As I have mentioned before, my family suffers from an amazing plethora of skin maladies, so therefore I must purchase make-up that nearly defies budget or face my life as a splotchy ogre. Though I have abandoned beige tubes of foundation that cost as much as one month's insurance on all three of my vehicles, merely because it has vacationed (however briefly) in the bowl of the facilities.

How is it that we have the technology to speak to people face-to-face on other continents, we can carry the entire library of congress in a computer the size of a paperback book, we can clap our hands and turn on a light across the house, we have robots that sweep our floors and torment our house cats, but we cannot have a smart filtering toilet that only allows #1 and #2 to enter its depths? (patent pending) Sounds like a corporate conspiracy among plumbers to me.

Toilet euphamisms rejected for this MoM outburst: Powder room (mostly because mine has been dusted in a variety of powders and the nomenclature is offensive to me), washroom, the restroom (parents all know that there is very little resting that occurs in this room), little boy/girl's room, the can, the John, the privy, the oval office (I rejected this, because too much crap happens in the real geographical location), the loo (which I personally use quite frequently, but it is unrecognized by most Americans), the smallest room in the house, and the comfort station.