Toilet Fixings

Very few people know this about me, but I’m quite proficient around the toilet.
For a couple of weeks now, women who use the women’s restroom at The Chronicle have done so because I have made it possible. I’m very proud of this, but until now, I haven’t told anyone that I’m the reason they can flush. I’m humble that way.
It all started here on a Friday night. Everyone else had gone home for the weekend to be with their loved ones and to go to the bathroom in private. I was here, all by myself, working hard on one thing or another, when I heard the echo of toilet water falling and swishing off in the distance, like an old wheezing man.
I went to investigate and discovered what we had here was a running toilet. I’d seen it before. The water keeps rolling in, hissing and hissing until your water bill can’t take it anymore. I didn’t mind the water bill part so much. I don’t pay it, but I’ll be darned if I’m going to listen to that thing run while I’m trying to write.
So I stepped gingerly into the women’s bathroom with both hands over my eyes, just sort of peeking through the crack between my fingers. I knew I was the only one around, but you never know what you’re going to find in a women’s bathroom.
Courageously, I stared directly into the eye of the storm and found exactly what I expected. We had a running toilet on our hands.
The thing about a running toilet is that once you diagnosis the disease, you’ve got to go digging for the source of the problem.
In my 10-year history of solving toilet troubles, I’ve discovered a running toilet can be caused by any number of things.
You’ve got your suction-hatch thing around the hole part, which if it’s not sealing can cause your toilet to run.
Then there’s the floating rubber ball thing that measures how much water should go in the bowl, or out of the bowl, I’m not sure which exactly, but if that thing is messed up you’re in trouble.
The most common cause of a running toilet has to be the broken chain. For you casual, non-professional toilet mechanics, the chain is about 8-inches long and is made not from nylon rope or strong steel links, but those tiny little metallic balls. They’re exactly like the little pen-holding chains at banks.
These wonders of American engineering are designed to be connected directly to the flusher, that little thing outside the toilet that the human flusher uses to flush the toilet. Of course, if you haven’t figured this out by now, we’re talking strictly about analog toilets. I’m not sure how to fix those digital toilets that flush on their own.
If there’s a break somewhere on the chain of the analog flushers, you must reconnect. You really have to start being creative when it’s the chain itself that breaks. I’ve used everything from dental floss to a shoe lace to fix broken toilets, although I would caution against trying a piece of linguini.
Luckily for me, the flusher chain in The Chronicle’s women’s toilet was still intact. All I had to do was reconnect it to the flusher. The only difficult part in doing that is reaching into the cold murky water that resides under the hood.
It took until I was in college before I figured out that the water back there is relatively clean, but since then that knowledge served me well.
When college girls move off-campus they seem to gravitate toward quaint little places with suspect toilets. Once I fixed one, my nights were booked for the rest of my undergraduate years.
I still think the reason my beautiful wife decided to marry me was the way I fixed her toilet when she was in college. Even to this day, I get to leave the seat up whenever I feel like it because I’ve convinced her it’s better for the toilet that way.
Yes, toilet fixing has been good to me. It may have started as a cheap and easy way to meet girls, but I respect it so much more now. I see myself as a facilitator of the natural world. Humbly keeping our nation beautiful, one flush at a time.

Ollie North and Fawn Hall Hopped-Up On Goofballs.

In my 29 years on this earth, very rarely have I ever been in a position where I'd consider myself to be a victim.
Aside from having to fight off occasional unwanted advances from leggy dames, the only things I've really ever been a victim of are circumstance, slow feet on the basketball court and a double shot from above by a bird with bowel troubles.
All of that changed last month when I found myself swept up in a world of international crime after it was discovered that someone was having an all-expense paid fiesta in Mexico on me.
Our story begins on a quiet Wednesday night in Simpsonville. It wasn't raining, but it looked like it could.
I was home watching a Film Noir movie marathon. I was right in the middle of "Double Indemnity," the great film with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, when my cell phone started playing that funky little Verizon tune known simply as "Breakdown." I recognized the voice on the other end. It was my wife. She was as frantic as Tom DeLay in an ethics committee meeting. "I think someone is spending our money," she said.
My wife handles the bread and the money in our family. She's detail-oriented. I'm not, which is kind of a strange thing not to be when you're a news editor, but listen baby, enough about me. A crime was being committed and I had to do something about it.
A little quick detective work and some accurate record keeping by the wife led us to discover someone was withdrawing $4,000 pesos at a time from an ATM in a grocery store in Matamoros, Mexico. They also bought some groceries and had a few shots of tequila and dinner with 300 of their closet amigos in what I expect was a nice quiet, out-of-the-way place. I have never been to Matamoros, but I knew the type. Seedy. Like a rotten watermelon.
I was shaken. Stirred. Someone had to pay and it wasn't going to be me.
I phoned up our bank's automated, after-hours hotline and had our account frozen colder than the Atlanta Braves in the playoffs. That was all we could do for the night, meanwhile some punk was walking the beat with wallet full of my Benjamins, or Hidalgos as they say in Mexico.
I tried to sleep that night, but I couldn't. The dog was barking. I thought about how I would buy a muzzle for that beast when I got my money back.
I tried to retrace my steps. How could this happen?
My wife shreds our receipts faster than Oliver North and Fawn Hall hopped-up on goofballs. It can't be her fault. It's never her fault.
Did I do something wrong? In retrospect, it probably wasn't such a great idea to buy those manhood enhancement creams on-line with the debit card. You live and learn in this crazy world.
The next day we went to the bank. We proved we weren't in Matamoros making those purchases and the bank stooges said we'd get our money back. We did. I was impressed. Those bank stooges aren't so bad.
I thought about buying a one-way ticket to Matamoros and tracking down that street tough who took my money, but Hurricane Rita was heading that way, and I didn't want any part of that.
Rita -- there never was a better name for a femme fatale -- would hopefully take back all of the goods bought on our dime. And that would be payback enough for me.