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.