Feeling Flushed...

The other day, I noticed that my toilet wouldn’t stop running. Before someone told me that I’d better go catch it, and being conscious of water conservation, I decided I’d better see if I could fix it. Most toilets over here are the type with the knob that you pull up from the centre of the tank. So I loosened it and figured out how to remove the cover. I’m no plumbing expert, but I’ve got a few shards of common sense left kicking around my skull, so I realized that the stopper wasn’t forming a seal down at the bottom of the tank. I undertook my usual handyman action, which I like to call "fiddling," that I have performed with next to no success on various appliances and fixtures the world over. I fiddled with the stopper shaft, and it seemed to form a seal. The toilet stopped running and the tank began to fill. Ah, success never smelled so sweet… well… not exactly. It may not have been a permanent fix, but in any case, I left the cover off in case it happened again.

Having finished my work as a plumber, I hitched up my pants, and decided I had earned a nap. I settled down and was soon dreaming of a magical land where Q’s aren’t followed by U’s. About an hour later, I woke up, but I wasn’t sure why. I had the distinct sensation that something wasn’t right. I remembered that in my dream it was raining, but I could still hear water. Subaru Kazoo must be showering, I thought, as I rolled over, still in a daze. Wait a minute, I realised, waking up, there’s no way I could hear Kazoo’s shower from my room. I stood up with cold dread in the pit of my stomach and opened the bathroom door.

A plume of water was geysering from the top of the toilet tank. Subaru must have actually decided to take a shower and asked the servants to turn on the water pump downstairs that brings us enough pressure to shower. For some reason, the added pressure blew the valve on the toilet intake and it shot across the tank, hitting the opposite side, arching through the air, and quite literally all over everything. All over my towels, all over the toilet paper and Q-tips, all over the pigeons, all over my toothbrush (fantastic!), and all over my cologne, which is great, because if there’s one thing I like on my toilet water, it’s toilet water.

I took a tentative step and nearly slipped and killed myself. I skittered across the floor toward the toilet tank like a drunk on skates. I reached in and flushed the toilet, which I thought was smart, until I realized that it would in no way inhibit the flow of water. I slid over to the water taps down by the floor and twisted them off. The plume of water shrank down to nothing, and I was left only with the sound of screaming baby pigeons in their saturated windowsill roost. Ah, I thought to myself, so this is what it sounds like, when doves cry.

I spent the next hour working the squeegy over the tiles, cleaning and mopping up. Where I once had a running toilet, I now had a completely busted ass toilet, to use the technical term. I walked out and found Subaru Kazoo and asked him if he knew anything about toilets. "Why?" he asked. "Because mine just exploded." I replied. "Oh…" he said," Shitty." Yup, good ole Subaru Kazoo, always a good man in a jam.