Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Bathroom etiquette

If the main line from your house to the sewer has become clogged with roots, and it's midnight, and no Rooter-Tooter guy can come until the next afternoon, and your commode can hold only so much (well, you know) . . . and toilet paper . . . and Mr. Clean (for obvious reasons) . . . and, by God, you are fresh out of chamber pots (known in my Southern childhood as "slop jars") . . . .

Well, this means at some point you will depend upon the kindness of friends (and the neighborhood Starbucks). In this eventuality, you will find that your friends just might feed you lunch in addition to sharing their loo.

Also in this eventuality, it is good manners to actually buy some coffee from Starbucks after you've taken care of bidness. Just make sure that the sewer-rooter guy probably will have the job done before the rental on your Starbucks tall mocha has expired.

If the timing is dicey, buy a pastry or a CD instead.

LIKEWISE, WHEN THE SEWER BACKS UP, it's useful to be doing laundry at the time . . . as opposed to No. 2. In the first case, your family room carpet will end up really wet next to the utility room, but it will not require haz-mat experts to clean up. Instead, it will be pretty clean, and a wet vac -- and 12 hours or or so of the electric-fan treatment -- ought to do the trick.

Fortunately for Mrs. Favog and myself, it was the washing machine that exposed the, uh, arterial blockage. That only resulted in Mr. Favog's profligate use of the full-range of Anglo-Saxon profanity. (Funny how some people don't take to soaked carpets at 12:30 a.m., a door out to the garage that falls off the hinges and shlepping ShopVac load after ShopVac load of soapy water out into a snowstorm -- and 10-degree cold -- in a flannel robe and very soaked slippers.)

Now, if the "triggering event" somehow had involved the upstairs toilet and, uh, No. 2, blogging would have been very light for a while. It takes time to a) remove all one's valuables from a residence, and b) set it afire.


But it didn't, and now -- thanks to Rooter-Tooter guy No. 3., Discount Sewer & Drain of Omaha, (402) 572-8639 -- the plumbing now plumbs, and at a reasonable cost, too.

As opposed to Rooter-Tooter guy No.1, who thought that we thought that unless we paid him $275 we would go the way of the unfortunate San Jose "hold your wee" contestant. Or Rooter-Tooter guy No. 2, who quoted a rate of $85 an hour but mentioned nothing about a "mandatory" $150 video colonoscopy of our sewer line, which could be broken, you know, as he tried to upsell us to a $660 super-duper drainline high colonic, because roots are like Tribbles . . . cut out one and 87 billion replace it.

Aye, happiness is carefree flushing. And a dry carpet.

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