The Day I Learned Supermarkets Don’t Carry Plungers
How COVID Clogged My Toilet
For every long running sitcom, the time eventually arrives when the writers start running out of new ideas of how to structure episodes and fall back on old tricks. One such trick is the domino effect. It seems the writers’ room of my life has now run out of ideas and is relying on the domino effect to bring any variety to my corona quarantine.
If you’ve only just awoken from a coma and didn’t know, we’re in the middle of a pandemic, Tom Brady is moving to Florida, and the only thing harder to get these days than a stiff drink at your local pub is a roll of toilet paper. Since I was adamant that I would not be one of those people who stockpile insane amounts of toilet paper, I found myself with half a roll left about a week and half ago, which unfortunately, was about a half a week too late. Yikes. And so we meet domino number one — my stubbornness.
Two supermarkets and a CVS later, I was able to grab one of two remaining packages of toilet paper. Quilted Northern. Roughly 120932 ply. Little did I know, this would be the beginning of my undoing, and domino number two.
Days passed me by. Toilet paper rolls were swapped out. Life, or so I thought, would chug along in my new normal. This was, of course, until that fateful Thursday morning.
The thing about my apartment is that, well, on the surface it isn’t nice. The price is right and so is the location, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the Queen of England would care to drop by any time soon. My oven is responsible for all the output of heat in the winter time, I have that old grade linoleum where there might be some asbestos lingering under there (I like to think that adds a touch of excitement to my life), and my toilet runs if you don’t jiggle the handle. However, as I said before, the price is right and my rent has remained controlled in exchange for my silence. I suppose if you want to go back far enough, the original first domino would be my cheapness.
This brings me to that fateful Thursday morning in which I woke up, used my facilities as one does, and flushed the toilet. Since my toilet runs on and on, it sometimes takes a beat before I remember to jiggle the handle. This unfortunately was one such time. Sadly, in this instance, what jogged my memory was the toilet water that had spilled over the edges and was flooding my bathroom.
One handle jiggle later and the water stopped running. Fine. Problem one, solved. Next problem? There was piss water all over my floor and cleaning products haven’t exactly been plentiful throughout the coronapocalypse. But that’s fine, I can be resourceful, I sopped it up. Of course, there was still the one big issue before me and that issue was, how the hell do I get this unclogged.
Before I even got to that old chestnut, there was still one final hurdle I needed to clear and that was to get the remaining water out of the toilet, otherwise it’d be round two with floor scrubbing. So I grabbed a glass I now no longer own, held my breath, and dipped my hand down wrist deep to begin baling out the water. Admittedly a low point.
Triumphant in finishing this particularly disgusting task, I deposited the glass in the garbage and moved on to the last stage. For my final act, I looked to my one true savior, Google. We’d had so many good years together. Surely, Google would tell me how to unclog a toilet with no plunger. There we have yet another domino — my laziness as I never bothered to acquire such an implement. The best search result I was given was dish soap and boiling water. I tried. I failed. And sadly, after the briefest of dumpster-dives, I was back to baling out more water.
The only option left was to try to source a plunger. Due to the social distancing domino (I realize these are the most non-chronological dominoes ever) the only stores I could reasonably get to were grocery stores. It was, of course, at this point I came to learn that supermarkets don’t carry plungers. Time to try my neighbors. It’s been two years, I suppose it’s time we actually met. Plus, there could be a fun layer of irony in meeting any of them in a time where we aren’t supposed to be within six feet of each other, let alone swapping household items.
Alas, no one was home and so I was resigned to one final option. ‘Ole Angie, my eighty-five year old landlady. So, I clomped downstairs to her flower shop which she still refused to close despite being lectured by her children, me, probably the other tenants, and the odd mailman.
“Angie, I was wondering, do you have a plunger I can borrow?”
“A what?”
“A plunger!”
“Oh, a plunger. Why?”
When I drop off the rent check, I quite enjoy the idle chit chat. When I’m covered in my own toilet water, not so much. Why else on this earth would I be asking for a plunger? “Because I have a clog!” There, I told her, she’ll give me the plunger, I’ll be on my way. Ha. Ha. Ha.
“Well why? What kind of toilet paper are you using?”
Is that the important question Angie? I love you, but is it? I couldn’t even remember at that point so I just yelled a toilet paper brand over to her. “Charmin!”
“That’s your problem, I always use Scott. You should really use Scott. It goes right down.”
“But you can’t get any toilet paper right now. Every one bought it all.”
“Of course you can! Just go to the CVS! It’s right here!” She gestured wildly to her left.
When I’m eighty five, I look forward to saying whatever nonsense I feel like. So I admitted defeat and went with, “You’re right.”
“Okay, let me go see.”
She toddled off and returned with a range of plunging options. The plunging was successful, Angie gave me several more lectures when I returned the (very thoroughly sanitized) plunger to her, and everything concluded very anticlimactically.
You could go back and recount all the dominoes in an appropriate order to try and find the source of what set off this grotesque chain of events. But, I’ve decided that the overwhelming domino that started off this particular episode was the one of mass panic and the complete loss of logic that accompanies a herd mentality.
I literally found myself that Thursday elbow deep in a urine infused cocktail because of our collective insanity and selfishness. And that is the dumbest domino of all.
