"What are we, plumbers?" My telling toilet tale
Funny-guy newspaper columnist Dave Barry once told a telling tale about toilets.
You know that time in the dead of night, when your toilets start to voice their opinions, their waters running, just for a few seconds, before turning off again?
Barry had a sensible explanation for that strange phenomenon.
It was the makings a toilet conspiracy, he said.
Your johns were talking to one another, strategizing how they were all going to overflow in the middle of next Friday night’s cocktail party.
A little Miami humor, I guess.
But it’s true. I don’t trust my toilets.
And while I’m certainly no Dave Barry, I often resort to a little potty humor. Yes, I have stooped to telling this joke about commodes.
Here goes:
Only one of these two statements is correct:
- The toilet was invented by a man named Thomas Crapper.
- He made his newfangled invention in Flushing, N.Y.
And the answer is … !
1, of course.
Crapper, a 19th century London plumbing impresario, manufactured one of the first widely successful lines of flush toilets. He actually didn’t invent the toilet, but he did develop the ballcock, an improved tank-filling mechanism still used in toilets today.
Close enough for me.
Toilets, at least in my house, have been both friend and foe.
I don’t spend much time there in their realm, actually. No War and Peace-length novels read in installments for this customer.
But have a toilet go on the fritz at the wrong time and the whole house circles the drain.
It’s like, ‘Oh, Crap! not again!”
A few years back, I clogged the toilet in the bathroom attached to my outdoor office casita. (It’s a long sad story.) Like the tool that I am, I had no plunger so I resorted to using the toilet brush to get the flow going again.
Except the brush snapped off at the neck, leaving bristle part submerged just out of reach down the pipe. Plumbers charge $300 for such house calls. So I let that toilet stew in its juices, figuring out how to remedy my problem without breaking my bank.
If you’re a lucky guy, solutions eventually present themselves.
In this case, it came in the small package of my then 10-year-old niece, Kalea.
It was Thanksgiving and my toilet by then had been dormant for weeks. Kalea came to Vegas with her parents for the long weekend.
We were throwing a party and my wife and her sister — Kalea’s mother — were in the kitchen making homemade cumin lamb on a stick. They wore plastic gloves that stretched all the way to their elbows, working hard.
Kalea, wanting to help, donned a pair of the gloves that must have reached all the way to her armpits.
“Let me help,” she said.
“Go away,” her mother responded.
Luckily, I was there to witness the exchange.
I saw that child with her small hands, her arms protected in a sheath of plastic.
“Hey Kalea,” I said. “You can actually help me.”
I took her out to the casita toilet and explained the job at hand. All she had to do was reach up inside the toilet and see if she could get her hand on that brush head.
She looked at me wide-eyed.
“Don’t worry,’ I said, “there’s no snakes or baby crocodiles down there. That’s just in movies.”
God love her, the kid dove into the task. She bent down and reach and reached.
“I almost got it,” she said at one point.
But, alas, the brush was too far gone.
Later, after a few glasses of wine, I told her parents the story and they looked aghast.
In bed, my wife chastised me.
“It’s bad enough that you asked a 10-year-old girl to reach up inside your nasty old toilet,” she said. “But then to tell her parents about it!”
There was a perfect explanation, I said.
The last thing I wanted to do was have her tell her parents on the way home a little story about how her weird Uncle John had taken her aside during the party and asked her to reach inside his toilet.
It was best I fessed up myself.
For once, my wife agreed with me. That was indeed the wisest choice.
Then, a few weeks ago, another toilet in my house blew a gasket.
A plumber came. He replaced the flush valve, but the toilet still sang its watery song.
“You need a new toilet,” he said.
He seemed like a nice guy. I liked him. Heck, he didn’t even wear plumber’s pants. I couldn’t see a thing down there.
So, being the Thorough Joe that I am, I decided (actually my wife did) to replace all three toilets at the manse — two in the house and one out in that shotgun shack office.
One day, we trundled down to our local Home Depot and browsed the toilet aisle. We gazed up at a selection, sizing them up like a King and his Queen looking for new thrones, which we were, of course.
But — who knew? — toilets have changed these days. Along with new faster flushes, the standard seat is now 16-1/2 inches from the floor. They call it a comfort toilet. Maybe the toilet cognoscenti were tired of hearing the word squat applied to their product.
At 16 inches and change, you could do more of a refined sit.
But not my wife. She’s not as tall as I am, hardly. She worried that with a new comfort size, her shorter legs would dangle, not touch the floor at all. She also worried about shorter people, like her other or kids.
And where’s the comfort in that?
So we ordered two regular toilets (with oval bowls for those manly night visits) and one children’s model. We paid for Home Depot to deliver and install the new toilets, and haul away the old ones.
Dandy.
A guy came to do the job and found out that one of the toilets was damaged.
He was a local plumber contracted by Home Depot and he told us to contact them and he’d bring out a new undamaged toilet.
We decided to go down to Home Depot ourselves.
It was in the evening, near closing time: the hour where creeps and cretins lurk. I walked up to a kid in his teens. What took place was a scene from the movie Clerks.
I told the kid about our toilet issue.
“You gotta bring back the toilet,” he insisted.
“What are we, plumbers?” my wife asked.
It was simply her best line of the year and I loved her for it.
We explained that we had paid for Home Depot to accomplish this task.
He said we had to call the plumbing contractor, and gave me a slip of paper with the telephone number.
I looked down. There were only six digits.
234-545.
“Um, there’s only six numbers here,” I said.
“No there aren’t,” he answered.
I sighed. My wife sighed. The kid sighed.
We were at an impasse, but we worked it out, all three of us. Two of us, at any event, were college graduates. He handed over the last mystery digit.
Well, we got our children’s-sized toilet a few days later, spanking new and undamaged.
For now, the toilets in my house are quiet, not a sound, even at night.
But I’ve told them this right to their little porcelain faces:
“Go ahead and plot. Scheme all you want, fellas. Because we now live in the Age of Covid. And I ain’t gonna be throwin’ no cocktail parties anytime soon.
And then something happened that you will not believe but that I swear is true.
Their faces flushed.