From the amount of feedback I received from the travel nightmare story it’s clear that you people seem to revel in the misfortune of others. Well… you’re in luck. This also happened in the past month and would make a wonderful scene in a movie (or perhaps “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”)
It was 6:45am and I was stumbling through my morning. You know how it is – you’re awake, but not really AWAKE. I went into our half bath… still a little groggy… and stood in front of the toilet. We have a framed photo of some palm trees over the loo that we took on our Hawaiian honeymoon. On this particular morning, that photo looked just a little crooked. I reached up in my morning haze to adjust the frame on the wall and it slipped right off its hook and shot downward.
Now for some reason this toilet sits a little bit off the wall. JUST enough room, as it turns out, for a decorative projectile to fire through the gap. So in a split second, the photo slides down the wall and disappears behind the toilet heading for the floor. I tense up and brace for the breaking glass noise that is surely coming. We have hard wood floors in this bathroom and this can’t end well. Instead of a crash, however, I hear a thud and a hissing. PSHHHHHHH! A strange mist appears before me. It’s not until I feel my pajama pants clinging to my body that I realize what has happened.
The frame made a beeline for the toilet’s cold water supply line, catching it just right so as to pop it out from the underside of the tank and now water is rocketing out of this tube at an alarming rate. Like a tiny fire hose it is dousing my legs as I instantly reach down to turn off the water supply. This is a very small room. It’s a tight squeeze to get to the valve and this is also a knob that probably hasn’t been turned in 30 years. It’s stuck. Water is now plugging me in the shoulder and chest as I start to think, “do I need to go get a tool of some sort?” Keep in mind, all of this is happening in that early-morning “get used to the day” time. Gallons of cold water has a way of sobering you up in a hurry.
I decide in this moment that leaving the room to get ANYTHING is a bad idea and I am GOING to get this to stop. I dive onto the top of the toilet (belly on the seat) and reach over with both hands. My feet are leveraged against the wall and I give it everything I’ve got. The valve squeaks a bit and begins to turn. Within seconds the water is off and I am standing among the wreckage. Somehow the glass didn’t break, but the wood frame splintered apart and there is standing water in the bathroom that has started a small river into out into the main rooms.
Since it’s all hard wood I’m now getting a crash course in the topography of the back half of the house as this little tributary snakes its way across the family room, then forks. One stream moves toward the kitchen. The other creeps toward the mass of cords and power strips behind the TV/video game area. I think at this point I made an audible yelp of fear. I fly into the laundry room (splashing as I go) and grab every large towel I can find. I turn off the power strip that has been dampened and raise it onto a shelf. Disaster averted. The next several minutes are just towels sopping up water and me discovering new areas that have been corrupted – the game closet, the laundry room (did water actually make it in here on its own or is this a result of all the dripping off my soaked body when I fetched the towels?) Finally the spill appears to be contained and I gather up the soaking towels and hang them out on our back patio.
My wife was sick that morning and slept through this entire affair, so I quietly nudge her as I’m leaving for work. “Everything’s ok and the story is actually kind of funny, but don’t use the half bath. I’ll explain later.” She says she kind of forgot about it until she woke up and walked past the back patio. Apparently 9 full-sized bath towels dripping water got her attention.
The good news is that there was no major damage and the fix to the toilet was an easy one, but what a wakeup call! This is yet another reason that you really should have cameras set up everywhere. You never know when you’ll find yourself in the middle of an award-winning moment.
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