There’s nothing like having your plumbing back up to teach you
how easy you have it. And there’s nothing like not having a working
toilet available to show you that the Pavlov’s dog thing you
learned in school was, indeed, pretty darned accurate
– even though I’m not actually drooling for food at the sound of
a bell. Yet.
There’s nothing like having your plumbing back up to teach you how easy you have it. And there’s nothing like not having a working toilet available to show you that the Pavlov’s dog thing you learned in school was, indeed, pretty darned accurate – even though I’m not actually drooling for food at the sound of a bell. Yet.
Anyway, last week after I took a shower, I heard the noise that every person dreads. Gurgle, gurgle, burp. That, my friends, is the ominous sound of the main line backing up. And immediately after hearing that sound I had to use the bathroom.
I don’t know why. Well, I mean, I know WHY. I just don’t understand why two seconds before I had been happy in the shower with no urge to use the facilities. But once I heard the gurgle, gurgle, burp it was BAM! Gotta go. I felt like a participant in a new experiment, Pavlov’s Bathroom Theory. Hear a gurgle, gurgle, burp, gotta go.
Anyway, urge to use the restroom aside, I knew what gurgle, gurgle, burp meant. It meant, “Call the plumber, you’re about to be flooded.” But of course, I had to test that. So I performed an experiment. I flushed the toilet – without using it of course.
That was when two good things and one bad thing happened. First, the toilet overflowed. Now that was the bad thing, although it wasn’t entirely unexpected. But the good things were a) I was planning to mop anyway and wasn’t it awesome that the water was already there on the floor waiting for me; and b) thank goodness I didn’t use the toilet before flushing it because how gross would that be when mopping?
I just want to stop here and assure you that I usually don’t mop using toilet water.
Of course, at that point it didn’t matter. The waters were rising fast and pretty soon I’d be giving swimming lessons in the living room. I had no other choice. I had to plunge. I’ll be honest here. I do not plunge. Indeed, I have never plunged. Whenever the plumbing backs up I do what women across America have done for hundreds of years. I scream for my husband to get his butt in the bathroom and plunge the toilet.
Clearly that wasn’t going to work. Harry was safe in his office – presumably with working plumbing – 40 minutes away. And Junior was at school and not likely to be of much help anyway. His idea of plunging is using the plunger as a practice sword. And yes, that does disgust me just as much is it does you.
But once I got over the vision of my son waving a plunger with toilet germs on it all over my house, I figured I could just do it. Seriously, how hard could plunging be? I’m intelligent. I have an education. I have had serious and responsible jobs. I am raising a somewhat functional child. Surely I can plunge.
Surely I’m an idiot.
The problem is, you don’t just stick a plunger in there and voila! All the water magically goes away. You have to stick the plunger in there and jump around maniacally before the water will go away. So I did that. And I ended up having a second shower. Turns out jumping around the toilet while maniacally plunging is a great way to get soaking wet.
And then I remembered that there was a doo-hickey behind the toilet that turned the water off. And it was right then when I was trying to look behind the toilet and figure out how to work the doo-hickey when the clouds parted, the angels began to sing and the water began to recede in the toilet.
How cool was that? I had totally plunged the toilet. The only problem was, the other toilet was now full of water and there were some weird noises coming from the shower.
Thankfully, a very nice plumbing company sent out some people who were experts at gurgle, gurgle, burp removal. Within minutes of their arrival, the toilets could be flushed, the water could be run in the sinks and the dishwasher and the laundry could be done.
As for me? Well, once those guys fixed my plumbing and the gurgle, gurgle, burp went away so did my, er, Pavlovian response. That’s right. Once the toilets were fixed, the urge to go vanished. I’m not even going to try to figure out that one.
