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SPEAK
Unplugged The crappy side of community living
By Susan Melgren smelgren@kansan.com
There are some things every ablebodied person living with modern conveniences should know how to do. Plunging a toilet is one of them. Unfortunately for me, I've had more than my share of firsthand experience with this. Not because of any fault of my own, but because I live with a lot of other people.
I'm halfway through my fourth year in Douthart Scholarship Hall. Part of "schol hall" living is taking responsibility for the hall's upkeep by cooking or cleaning. Some personality quirk allows me to pull wet clumps of hair out of drains without finching, but the sight of leftover food makes me want to gag. So I signed up to clean bathrooms.
Usually this job isn't so bad. Apart from shedding lots of hair and leaving tooth-paste in the sink, girls are relatively clean in the bathroom. Every once in a while I encounter a mess that makes me wish I knew how to cook, but never in my five semesters of cleaning bathrooms had I seen a mess like the one I found on a May morning last semester.
It was a little before 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and I headed to our community bathroom to pee before my aerobics class. I don't remember what I was doing when I noticed it, but the sight made me stop. We have three toilet stalls in our bathroom, and someone had clogged the middle toilet. Normally I wouldn't care so much, but I had to clean the bathroom that day, and I feared this mess would still be there when I got around to cleaning.
The mess was horrific. Whoever had clogged the toilet had the good sense to turn the water off before it spilled over the rim of the bowl, but the murky water was backed up right to the edge and was lapping dangerously against the rim. The sight and smell of it turned my stomach.
I used a different stall and went to aerobics. I checked on the mess periodically throughout the day. It was still there. I wasn't surprised. It was the responsibility of one person, and whoever she was, she surely wouldn't fess up now.
When 7 p.m. rolled around, I knew I couldn't put off cleaning the bathroom any longer. With a sense of dread, I begrudgingly cleaned every other surface in that bathroom, leaving a wide berth around the middle stall. By this time, the mess had only worsened. Someone had stupidly tried to fix the clog by flushing the toilet
again so that the water had spilled over the edges and covered the floor in a footwide radius around the toilet.
I rolled my jeans up tightly and put on my worn-out blue Old Navy flip-flops. I heaved a huge sigh and grabbed the old plunger with the red wooden handle from the supply closet down the hallway. Then I waded in.
I had plunged a toilet before. It was disgusting, but it only took a few minutes worth of work. This, however, was the Goliath of clogged toilets. I stood for 30 minutes in the liquefied version of someone else's shit, thrusting that plunger again and again into the bowl until my back ached, my hands were blistered and tears streamed down my cheeks.The water would recede, so I would flush the toilet only to have it back up on me again. I switched plungers and flushed the bowl time after time to no avail.
The more I plunged, the angrier I became. Fury spread through every part of my body. My muscles tensed up, my heart rate accelerated and my veins flooded with adrenaline. I was so mad I wanted to throw up. All the while the cheery yellow walls of the stall mocked my pain.
Finally, my efforts worked. After cleaning and replacing the plunger, I took a long, hot shower. Steam covered the black tile walls of the shower as I thoroughly scrubbed every inch of my body, desperate to get the filth off. In my mind, I made another note in the book of wrongs I keep against community living.
Several months removed from that day, I no longer feel angry. I understand that not everyone facing a clogged toilet knows how to fix it. The water rises, panic hits, you run, and someone else is left to mop up your mess. I can now say I've been that person.
Cleaning that toilet was one of the worst moments I've had living in a scholarship hall. Living with a large group of people is always challenging. The size allows for a certain anonymity when it comes to taking responsibility. With 20 people sharing that bathroom, I could never narrow down the number of culprits enough to pin the blame on anyone. I still don't know who made the mess, and it's probably better that way.
And it's okay. What can you do? After all, shit happens. At least I know how to clean it up.
Photo Illustration by Ryan McGeeney After much plunge, sweat and tears, Susan conquered the commode at her scholarship hall and gained new perspective on community living.
October 23,2008
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