Bathroom Woes, Salty Toes

The bottom of this post is lined with toilet water for your utmost convenience.  

There's nothing quite like a malfunctioning bathroom.  But once you've had one, you'll be hard-pressed to see a toilet in the same light again.  Why is it that only home toilets seem to flood?  You never see people surfing on toilet water waves at Wal-Mart, and the industrial flush in those places always works flawlessly.  Perhaps it's punishment for being sedentary couch potatoes.  We should be out and about buying more couches and using bathrooms that work.  First world problems for the win.

(I should add that I recently went to a restaurant in which their second floor women's bathroom stall was locked from the inside, and emanating the stinkiest odors from someone's sassy excrement.  But I think that was more a fault of a customer and maintenance than an evil toilet.)

So I was in a meeting the other day, and the warm-up question was thus: "What's something funny that happened to you this week?"  "Well, my toilet flooded," I replied, half-laughing.  As I'd learned to expect over the week, everyone gasped, thinking of the worst possible situation.  But, dear reader, please note that my bladder was graciously empty in the advent of this fiasco.  Let's not get into past experiences, because nothing puts a damper on poop jokes like a toilet flooding with feces.

Now that I've disgusted you enough, let us delve into my reactions to this 6:20 AM bathroom chaos.  I'd like to say that I was studious enough to keep a troubleshooting manual taped to the side of my toilet, but alas, Bathroom Readers are my sole source of bathroom entertainment.  I grappled with the confounded twisty thing on the pipe while holding up the little black cap thing in the back so it couldn't release even more water into the system.  I'm really into this technical language thing, obviously.

I could almost hear the snores of my entire family downstairs, oblivious to my struggle.  Then to top it off, my 6:30 AM alarm went off with Big Bang's autotuned "Tonight" and I wailed in grief.  Only my wicked toilet was there to grin cutely at my pain, spraying water from every crack.  I had several brilliant ideas, and several stupid ones.  It turns out that the toothbrush-esque toilet cleaner doesn't work quite like a plunger.  I didn't want to test out my hypothesis that toe-washing water would provide the salt necessary for egg soup (not my idea, I got it from a Korean drama).

Through brute force (and realizing the twisty thing to close off the pipe was supposed to be turned the other way), the flood ceased, and I was able to return to my daily life.  Other than the fact, you know, that the water had somehow leaked through the tiled floor of my bathroom to the ceiling of the first floor, right where I had parked my school stuff for the night.  My physics notebook took the biggest hit, and for the rest of the day, I pulled out each subject notebook and wiped it on my backpack before returning to my studious, unafflicted-by-bathroom-woes self.