Tongue-In-Cheek … Foot-In-Mouth

An interesting fact about toilets: toilets just don’t explode all by themselves.  Toilets need lots of help to blow up.  Toilets are funny that way.   And the firing pin for toilet detonation usually comes in the form of a clog.

An interesting fact about clogs: clogs just don’t occur all by themselves.  Clogs need lots of help to become a clog.  Clogs are funny that way.   And the main clogging culprits are usually a member of your very own loving family, by which I mean your kids, who view your toilet as their very own personal wishing well, and you can pretty much find anything in a toilet, to include your son’s trombone.

And when you confront your child while holding his dripping trombone, he will provide you with the standard kid’s response, whereby he shrugs his shoulders and says the following:

“I don’t know how on earth my trombone got in the toilet, daddy, ha, ha, ha, daddy.  But I hope my wish comes true, daddy.”

So you being a good understanding and patient daddy, laugh right along with your well-wishing son, while at the same time you’re figuring out the best possible method for wrapping his trombone around his skinny scrawny pre-pubescent neck without leaving behind any fingerprints.

But to be completely frank, even though my name is “Bill,” toilets back in the day could have easily sucked down the entire horn section of a BIG band orchestra, no problem.  Sadly, toilets nowadays are crappy; no pun intended, well, maybe a little.

Seriously, I remember back when I was a kid.  We had toilets that could create such a serious vacuum, if you were not in a different time zone when you hit the flush lever there was a good chance that you, along with the roof, and any nearby planets would be sucked down the drain.

Unfortunately, those magnificent models of toilet are no longer being manufactured, because the environmentalist crowd felt that they use too much water when in full flush.  So, therefore, some weenie in some lab somewhere developed the “low flow” toilet, which sucks, well, actually they don’t suck, and that’s the basic problem, because if you have ever tried to flush anything owning a molecular weight heavier than a poppy seed down a “low flow” toilet, you are well aware of the fact that instead of hitting the flush lever once, holding onto the doorjamb for dear life, like we used to do with our old trusted toilets, with today’s “low flow” toilets you MUST repeatedly hit the flush lever so many times you’d think you were tapping out a Morse Code message, and STILL whatever it is you are desperately trying to flush won’t FLUSH!
As they say, things can be worse.  We could be living in the Middle East, where I understand they do not bother with flushing toilets.   They use a “low tech” approach: gravity.  Middle Eastern people basically use a hole in the ground, which has some fancy Middle Eastern name, which roughly translated means “a hole in the ground.”

Not sure about you, but the thought of squatting over a hole in the ground in a manner and position normally associated with a major league catcher, for me, and it may be just me, flushes the gravity approach pretty much down the drain.

Copyright © 2008 Bill Drury.  All Rights Reserved.

Bill Drury is a humor columnist for The Carriage Towne News.  Contact him via snail mail c/o The Carriage Towne News, P.O. Box 100, Kingston, NH 03848, or email him @  Drury1234@Verizon.Net, or to go his website @ www.billedrury.com.