BerthaBlog

The toilet in the hall bathroom has a gizmo to prevent it from running endlessly if the flapper is leaky. It involves a little ratchet that prevents the floater from going down, attached to a plastic chain that hooks to the flush lever. The idea is, even if the water level goes down, the floater will stay up unless the flush lever is pushed.

Yesterday the little plastic chain broke. Hence, the floater wouldn’t go down, the tank wouldn’t refill, and the toilet couldn’t be flushed.

Now, we have two bathrooms in our house. Two. We’re privileged that way.

So you would think that, on seeing that the toilet wasn’t flushing, my children—my teenaged, supposedly intelligent children—would go use the other bathroom.

Or maybe you wouldn’t think that, because you know some children and are familiar with their disgusting ways.

That’s right, my two boys continued to use the non-flushing toilet all night, filling it with piss and toilet paper and who-knows-what that wasn’t visible in the nastiness.

Today I repaired the chain. It was easy, I used a paperclip and had it working again in two minutes. Then, not realizing that the toilet paper floating in the bowl was hiding an entire night’s worth of output, I flushed the thing to see if my fix had worked.

Yeah. You can probably picture the fun I’ve had cleaning that up.