Stupid Is As Sister Does: Roto Rooter

…Or maybe you should just skip that.

I hate my powder room toilet. You can’t lean back on it (and I’m a leaner) because if you do, the tank leaks. You can’t flush more than two little pieces of toilet paper without it getting stopped up. When you flush it runs incessantly until you lift the lid and poke at the floater thingamabob.

Jill was going to fix it for me recently, but you know what ultimately happens when she comes to visit. We shop, we eat out and we nap. So, she had no time to tend to my toilet issues, of which there are many apparently.

So instead, I began nagging Jimmy to fix it. Nope, he was having none of it. He rarely uses the powder room so for him it’s a non-issue. ~~Asshole.~~ I was told to just keep lifting the tank lid and doing my thing with the thingy. Well gross. I don’t like sticking my hand in there even on rare occasions. If you think I want to do it every time I pee (which is often) you’ve got another think coming.

So I resorted to something you may find disgusting. Not flushing every time I pee. Now yeah, this could be gross, but with the amount of water I drink the pee is almost, well, non-pee.

So I did this yesterday. After tinkle number 3 I flushed and ran out of the house to get Madison from the bus stop. When I pulled back onto my street I see Mikayla in the driveway, waving frantically at me. What the hell? Is Publisher’s Clearinghouse here? Did I win something fabulous and she couldn’t wait till I got in the house to tell me?

No. Oh NO. The toilet was overflowing and she couldn’t make it stop. She closed the bathroom door and tried blocking it with towels. All that did was make a virtual tidal wave when I opened the door. Little did I know that my 12 year old daughter needed lessons on how to shut off the main water valve. Stupid me. This is obviously a skill every ‘tween needs these days.

So, I opened the door to something like this.

Okay, slight exaggeration, but not by much.

So Mikayla starts running for towels, I run to the garage for the shop vac…. oh crap… where’s the shop vac? So now I’m frantically getting the steam cleaner ready while frantically dialing Jimmy at work. No answer! Typical.

Might I just tell you that one of these is not meant to pick up 349,000 gallons of water? After emptying it 10 times I was finally able to get Jimmy on the phone.

Ah, relief will be on the way!

NOT! He refused to leave work to come home and help me with this catastrophe. I mean, whole-heartedly, I-don’t-give-a-crap-you-can-deal-with-it-yourself, refused. I clogged it, I didn’t watch my pee flush before I left the house, it’s my fault and now I have to deal with it. Never mind that I’d been nagging him over and over again about the faulty toilet for over a month. Nope, it’s my fault. Of course! Excuuuuuuuuse me (insert Steve Martin impression) for peeing!

Abundant profanities came forth from my mouth, tears squirted from my eyes and, instead of seeing little bluebirds circling overhead, I had sharp knives twirling a merry dance. Sharp Bloody Knives. Yes, visions of husbandacide were first and foremost in my mind.

When I finally snapped out of it, I followed ~~asshole’s~~ Jimmy’s instructions on where to find the shop vac and proceeded to lug it in the house and plug it in. It didn’t take long to fill that bad boy up and still, I wasn’t making a dent in it and my arms were shaking from pulling it along the sopping wet rug. Thank goodness Mikayla was there to help. We kept swapping jobs between the shop vac and the steam cleaner but still we couldn’t get the rug anywhere near dry.

Now I was stuck with visions of water creeping up the drywall and mold setting in to eventually kill us slowly. I was also still stuck with visions of husbandacide but that’s neither here nor there.

Mikayla and I were exhausted and commenced calling Jimmy’s cell phone over and over again. After all, it was after 4 p.m., so why couldn’t he just leave work and come home? Damn Caller I.D. ~~Asshole~~ Jimmy knew it was us calling so didn’t answer his phone.

I was now at the point where I was ready to turn that bloody knife on myself because I had hit the breaking point. This was too much for one woman and a 12 year old kid to handle, so I did what any slightly insane woman would do. I went and worked on my FaceBook farm. Yeah, you heard me right. I couldn’t do anymore. I was done. Wiped out. Both physically and emotionally.

I needed stress relief, and I found that in plowing and planting, plus calling Jill to scream in her ear about my sucky lot in life.

It was only at 8 p.m. that Jimmy finally walked in the door, wanting to know why I wasn’t face-down on the carpet sucking the water up through a straw (or something like that) while simultaneously pulling off a Roto Rooter on the faulty toilet. I’ll spare you the nasty details of the rest of our “conversation”. These things are sometimes better left unsaid, and left to the imagination of the reader.

I will tell you that I went to bed last night listening to the sound of Jimmy running multiple vacuums and fans and, I didn’t feel the least amount of guilt about it either.

Today the carpet is pulled up from one side of the room, folded over chairs with fans blowing on it. Luckily, it’s basically dry and this is just a precaution. The wet padding has been cut out, rolled up and disposed of, and later today I have to trek to Lowe’s to buy some new stuff. Oh, the joy!

So keep this story in mind the next time you pee and flush, and stupidly think it’s safe to walk away. Never walk away. Just don’t.do.it.