Essential household skills

As any good dad should, I just taught PBJ an important household skill that anyone over the age of 10 or so should know.

How to unstop a toilet with a plunger.

Now I’ve complained about our ridiculous commodes before.  They are the original 1.6gal flushers that work terribly unless you hold the handle down and sometimes not even then.  They were made before technology improved somewhat to where you could get decent pressure out of a 1.6 flush.  We had only one plunger and I was tired of running with it from one bathroom to the other, so I finally broke down and bought a second cheap plunger for the main bath, which is primarily used by PBJ.  I then taught her how to use the thing so I don’t have to go through the experience of enjoying a nice pizza only to hear the dreaded call, “Dad! The toilet’s stopped up again!”

Couldn’t she wait until AFTER I’m done eating before giving me such pleasant news?

Anyway, I got tired of dealing with everyone else’s turds, so I figured it was time she learned.

I first taught her the most important skill about unplugging a toilet.  How to check if it’s backing up without overflowing it.  I showed her the tankand the flapper valve, and how to reach in and slowly open it and see if the toilet is flushing or backing up, and quickly close it again.  Fortunately she wasn’t too hard to convince that the water in the tank is clean (well, there’s a little mildew in there, but better than reaching in the bowl, aka the poopie section).  I then showed her the proper way to plunge, and how to clean off the plunger without contaminating everything in sight (nothing worse than poopy plungers).  I also told her one good sign of a plugged toilet is very little water in the bowl, so to use the slow hand-in-tank flush method in such cases to prevent disaster.

Satisfied that she’d learned from our little toilet-unplugging class, I then sat down to a nice dinner of tuna casserole.

Hungry, anyone?

~ by The Real Dave on July 16, 2008.