Terrible Tuesday

             This week started off like any other, until Tuesday. Tuesday morning, I was woken up to my boyfriend asking me, “Do you know your toilet’s clogged?” No, I did not know that. So here I am confused and barely awake, trying to figure out how the toilet clogged while everyone was sleeping. Emphasis on ‘confused’ especially because there was nothing in it to have clogged it, the water level had simply just risen. My roommate and I did not own a plunger because this hadn’t happened before, and frankly we didn’t think about buying one when we first moved in. I told my boyfriend to just let it sit because he and my roommate had class soon and I had to leave to go to my nail appointment. There wasn’t anything we could do at this time, so I planned to just stop after my appointment and pick up a plunger to fix it.

            I then go to my nail appointment which is always a relaxing experience for me. I have a nail technician in Lima that I go to while I am away at school, and she always takes good care of me. I’m very picky about how I like my nails done and she constantly does them perfectly – as they should be for the price I pay. But anyway, I was thrilled with how my nails turned out because my birthday is this Friday, March 29, and so these were my ‘birthday nails’.

            When I arrived back to campus, I went to my dorm first to see the current state of our toilet, hoping that the water would have gone down during that time I was gone. The water had risen even more and was almost at the top of the bowl. So, I ran to Community Market to buy a plunger. This is where everything went south. The water was so high that when I tried plunging it water kept spilling over the ledge onto the floor. Once I took the plunger out of the toilet the water started rising again, spilling over the toilet and flooding our entire bathroom floor. I lost it at this point.

            Not knowing what to do, I quickly ran to the first RA’s room I saw and knocked on their door in hopes they were in there. After no response I bolted through Lima Hall to the room of the RA on call. Of course, no answer again. I finally got an answer from the third RA I tried. At this point I was so flustered and panicked that before he even got the door fully open, I just started yelling, “MY ROOM IS FLOODING AND NO ONE IS ANSWERING!” We both ran back to my room and to our surprise the water level in the toilet was back down and unclogged. Standing in toilet water, furious with a beat red face I look at this man and in a monotone voice simply say, “Never mind, I guess I’ll just go buy a mop.”

I went back to Community Market for the second time this morning, now to get a mop. As I am angrily trying to clean this mess, I am getting more and more annoyed at the fact that this mop is just pushing the water around and not absorbing anything. In the peak of my anger at this moment I look down and notice something. I look down and see that I have broken a nail. A broken nail, from the fresh set I have had for less than one hour. I know this is not the best way to handle stress and anger when I say this, but I am like a balloon – I let things build up until I eventually pop. It was at this moment I popped. I went ballistic, screaming bloody murder probably echoing throughout all Lima Hall as tears begin profusely streaming down my face. Now, I’m not usually a crier, but I needed to release my anger and it was either that or play an imaginary game of baseball using my mop as the bat and my tv as the ball.

My roommate then walked through the door, minutes before I had turned the entire place into a make-shift rage room. I told her, in a very heated manner, what had happened and then we finished cleaning everything up. We were able to use towels to soak up all the water and thankfully her boyfriend had a Swifter we were able to use to clean the floors after it was dried. In total, it took a couple hours to clean everything and many loads of laundry between all the dirty towels and bathmats.

If you take anything away from this story, let it be this piece of advice: do yourself a favor and buy a plunger for your bathroom before this happens.