The Toilet Whisperer

Or
The Dumbest 300 Words Ever Written

As much as I hate the ever-widening socio-economic gap in modern society, as much as I inveigh against our culture of the haves and the have nots, I still want to rub your noses in the fact that my bathroom has a toilet that flushes correctly. All you have to do is pull up on the handle and release it. The toilet will then flush and refill itself, almost like magic if you’ve been used to living months with a toilet that doesn’t do this simple task very well. You don’t have to jiggle the handle until you think that it has returned to the proper position and then come back into the bathroom after a few minutes because you can hear that the valve in the tank has not sealed so you have to jiggle the handle again. Please don’t hate me for living in this new state of luxury. Remember, thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s toilet that doesn’t need to be fiddled with every fucking time you take a leak.

I used to be just like you with your busted toilet. I used to have to finesse the handle on my toilet like someone bowing a Stradivarius, furiously working towards the finale of a movement (Pardon the musical-intestinal pun—the worst sort of pun). It took out-of-town visitors to motivate me to finally fix the thing once and for all. It finally took someone to actually tell me, “Dude, your toilet is broken. Do something.” Sometimes it takes an impartial observer to put your life into perspective. I was living like an animal but I didn’t know it. Hell, even a cat will complain when its litter box needs work.

All that it took was one of those plastic handcuff thingies that plumbers and cops use. They are sort of like the half brother of duct tape as far as their ability to fix almost anything. It has only taken me 8 months to do it and in this time I have probably wasted enough water to irrigate every golf course in Phoenix, Arizona for a summer.