Our toilet reformed. To properly appreciate this news, you must read the previous post here.
Have you read that entry? Okay, good. Now you know exactly how vile, how utterly evil, our toilet is (or was). A perfectly new toilet that failed to function properly and now for several years has failed to function properly. How we came to loathe the toilet. It never flushed properly. The weak among us would use a plunger every time we wanted water to actually go down the toilet. The rest of us would play a dangerous game of chicken with the toilet, hissing “Flush, flush, flush! Flush, you abomination!” As we watched the water lazily swirl higher and higher until (most of the time) it would finally surrender at the last possible moment and Woooosh tons of water would go down the tube. Water saving it was not.
Not only was this toilet vexing, but its obstinacy was perplexing. We had installed the toilet properly; why, why, was it in a state of perpetual not working? (Now is the time when you break the plunger over you head and hop around the bathroom gritting your teeth and going, “Nnngh! Nnngh! Nnngh!”)
So most of the readership doesn’t care, but for posterity, for the historical record, I am today noting that our toilet has reformed. It is now a good toilet. It is now a regular toilet. It now works.
The solution came all by itself when Evan was cleaning the toilet. Over the years the toilet has been cleaned many times before, including by me, and if Evan was doing something magically special only he knows. He says he was simply scrubbing very vigorously at the large hole at the base of the bowl where water is supposed to shoot out (my toilet vocabulary fails me). He said black stuff then came pouring out. After that the toilet flushed. Properly.
It was with much amazement that we all over the course of that day and the next flushed the toilet and discovered that yes, indeed, the toilet flushed like any natural toilet and continued to flush properly. Water came shooting out of the hole sending everything down the chute in a right quick and proper manner.
Clearly the water pipe was in some way blocked. Not 100% I suspect, but enough so that the water only sluggishly came out and didn’t do its job properly. So . . . the next question that sprang to all our minds was “When did this obstruction occur?” Certain people around here think that on initial installation the toilet was working 100% properly and sometime shortly thereafter it became plugged by someone’s . . . byproducts.
I don’t think so. While sometimes the toilet seemed to work somewhat better than other times, I never, ever, remember the toilet working as well as it does now. Second, I find it extremely difficult to believe that some organic human byproduct could keep the toilet so thoroughly crippled for three years. I suspect some manufacturing issue, or something like that. Some kind of deposit within the toilet which shouldn’t have been there at the time of purchase and which has festered for these long years. I dearly wish Evan had given a general announcement when the black stuff came out so I could have analyzed it. Unfortunately he didn’t know the black cloud heralded a new age in toilet flushing, and so he flushed it all down with no further notations.
The exact nature of the obstruction will probably forever remain a hotly disputed subject, but one thing we can all agree on is that the toilet works properly now. I think we are all slightly holding our breath, wondering if the toilet will go back to its old villainous ways. But it has been several days now and it continues to behave. Rejoice all ye peoples, rejoice.
(And you can use our bathroom now.)
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