As it Turns Out

As it turns out, it wasn’t the toilet repairman at the door. It was the UPS driver, delivering a non-descript brown paper package for the sister-wife. I didn’t ask what it was.

So this meant the toilet remained in disrepair, and I was faced with another night of wet bottom complaints and blood-curdling screams from the Nordic Warrior Queen, a fact of which she reminded me shortly before climbing into bed.

Now I’m not a mechanical guy, but I looked at the situation and it didn’t appear to be such a big deal. The big rubber flapper thing – you know, the dealy-ma-bob at the bottom of the tank – was sitting crooked on the tank drain. This was caused by the fact that the chain, one end of which was attached to said dealy-ma-bob, was hanging down at an angle, which caused a skewing effect on the whole contraption when you flushed and the water ran out and the dealy-ma-bob came back down crookedly thus letting water leak slowly from the tank once it had filled up again. Make sense?

So I tried to fix it.

Attached to the backside of the flush handle was a cheap fucking no-good piece of crap metal with some chain holes punched in the end of the thing at some commie Chinese factory. This is where the other end of the chain was attached. It seemed to me I could remove the chain temporarily and just bend that piece of metal around until it was aligned over the dealy-ma-bob and…shit. It broke.

It was nine o’clock at night. The toilet was broken. We were out of ice-cream buckets. What the hell was I supposed to do?

In analyzing the situation, the only logical solution was to Scotch tape the chain to the broken stub of the piece of crap Chinese handle. So that’s what I did. Presto, it worked like a champ. I’m a genius. At least I was, until around three in the morning when the tape got wet and fell off and floated away, whereupon it jammed into the inner workings of the infernal machine we call a toilet and the fucker ran all night long. We didn’t sleep a wink.

Guess where I was at 6:05 in the morning? Home Depot, buying parts to repair the toilet.