A Road Less Travelled

Everyone has embarrassing moments; it’s simply a fact. Everyone has to go through those moments where you don’t quite know where to look and you suddenly wish your super power was invisibility. If you haven’t had an embarrassing moment please raise your hand. See? I thought so.

Now, I figure you can divide the people who’ve had embarrassing moments (that would be everyone, remember?) into roughly two categories- those who keep their embarrassments to themselves and very carefully avoid telling anyone who could possibly bring the sorry, sordid tale up again in, say, five years and those who get such a kick out of themselves that they simply must give their friends more reason to mock them constantly for the rest of their days. I would be in the second group which is why I’m writing this blog post.

A couple of days ago I took the children swimming. Thanks to a generous family from both Providence and Samaritan we have a life vest for Justice so now I can take all five ambulatory children swimming all by myself. Yay for me. And the fact that the life vest is a pink and green Barbie vest in no way detracts from the hilarity of Justice paddling like mad with his crazy face on.

So we went swimming and we had a good time and then it was time to get out. I don’t like walking through the hallways dripping and sopping so I made the children all sit in chairs that are far away from the drowning hazard while I went to get changed. I used the facilities while I was in the bathroom changing and I, very reasonably I thought, flushed the toilet. Or, I should say, I tried to flush the toilet. Rather than going down, the water in the toilet very unhelpfully stayed where it was. And apparently the toilet thought that was a great idea and decided to put more in. Once you start filling up a toilet bowl it must be hard to start because in no time at all that toilet was merrily overflowing, spilling water all over the floor.

Before I continue in this story there is a small detail I need to be clear on. I’ll try to be as delicate as possible and say that there was nothing… solid in the the toilet at the time. So, no worries on that point, okay?

So there I am- in a bathroom with a toilet that found its life purpose as an imitator of Old Faithful. Ideally I would have been able to just leave the bathroom and go find someone who gets paid to get toilets off the water and into rehab. And believe me, from where I was standing leaving looked pretty good. The only trouble was I had gone into the bathroom to get changed and hadn’t exactly finished at the time of the flushing attempt. I have a reasonably honed sense of decency so running out of the bathroom half-clothed was not an option on the table. Getting dressed posed something of a problem, too, because I can’t levitate and I didn’t want to drag my pants through all the water on the floor which was still being added to, may I add. This was one enthusiastic toilet I was dealing with. “Why do things halfway?” seemed to be its motto. “If I’m gonna spew water all over the floor I might as well go for broke and see how much I can get out there before someone shuts me down!”

The situation looked bleak. I was trapped by my own sense of modesty with a toilet doing an impression of Niagara Falls that must have gone over great at all the toilet parties. And let’s not forget in all the hubbub that I still had five children parked in chairs not many feet from a body of water large enough to drown each and every one of them if they suddenly decided to jump into it and forget how to swim. Or stand. Time was of the essence.

The situation was bleak, but hope was yet not lost. My eyes lit upon my only chance of getting out of the bathroom with any dignity left to me. A drain! A drain in the floor! Calling on my fine skills of, um, water soccer I guess, I began gently kicking the water towards the drain. I used my towel to barricade the gap under the door so that all the flooding would stay in the small room with me. I kicked, I shoved, the water went down the drain and got soaked up into the towel and yet there still seemed a lot of water left on the floor. Far too much to even think of trying to get my pants on. This is when my brain kicked in and reminded me why I keep it around. “Hey,” my brain said, “maybe you should try to stop the water.”

Aha! Stop the water from pouring out of the toilet. What an idea! That’s why I pay my brain the big bucks. In a soggy, sloshy flash I had taken the lid of the toilet off and gotten it to calm down about the water situation. It was something of an ordeal, I’ll admit.

“Water!”, the toilet was shouting, “Glorious water!”

“No, no,” I said, speaking very firmly, “More water is bad!”

“I love the water,” the toilet insisted.

“Try chewing gum instead,” I suggested and wrested the flappy thing back into place. The water stopped. There was quiet in the bathroom.

However, there was also a whole heap of water on floor of the bathroom. I went back to my water soccer moves and tried to nudge, shove and all around encourage the water in the direction of the drain. A dry floor was in sight. The possibility of putting on pants was just on the far side of the horizon. The emergency had passed.

As the adrenaline rush and the flush of victory waned a thought intruded on my satisfaction. The toilet was still broken. It was no longer spewing water like a newborn baby, but I knew that the toilet’s resolve was not firm. At the first sign of more water it would fall right off the wagon with a huge splash. This was not good.

Part of me suggested I just sneak out and pretend it never happened. Yes, someone would have to deal with it, but I would just make sure that person wasn’t me. And hey, maybe it would give someone else a funny story. But the part of my mind that clasps its hands in its lap and looks very stern somehow got the floor. It began speaking most eloquently about the cowardice in such actions. It made making the manic toilet someone else’s problem go from looking like the best idea since lip balm to looking like a deed worthy of a sneaking, cowardly, deceitful person who probably chewed with her mouth open and talked at the theater. I could not be that person. So as I sloshed and shoved the water toward the drain I composed a little speech I would present to whoever was at the front desk.

“Pardon me,” I would say, “The toilet in the ladies’ bathroom overflowed.”

I examined my little speech while I rolled up the legs on my pants and somehow got them on without dragging them on the still wet floor. It seemed to say all that was necessary. It was succinct and polite, informative without being apologetic. I mean, it’s not like it’s my fault the toilet had no self-control. Maybe the hotel should have a stricter screening process when choosing which fixtures to put in their bathroom.

I surveyed the new situation. I was fully dressed, there was water on the floor, but it had been mostly contained. There was nothing for it but to collect my charges and go present my speech.

I got the children from by the pool where they had very obediently been sitting in chairs and not drowning. As we walked past the bathroom I had to struggle briefly with the part of my mind who was very excited by the prospect of not talking to the person at the front desk. It made a couple excited noises, but the other part gave it one stern look and it subsided. I sent the children to go stand by the elevator; I didn’t want any witnesses. Then I went to inform someone of the situation.

I only rehearsed my speech twenty or so times as I walked the ten steps to the front desk. Gathering my courage and feeling really very stupid that this was such as ordeal I took a breath and opened my mouth.

Ordinarily, one wants people who work service jobs to notice when a customer needs assistance. Normally, one wants conscientious service from people at the front desk of a hotel. In this case, when the man working there said, “Can I help you?” before I started my speech it just threw me off. My speech began with “pardon me”. You can’t very well say “pardon me” after someone’s said “can I help you”. How would that look? It would look like I’d prepared an entire speech over something really small, that’s how it would look. So instead of delivering my speech with grace and aplomb I stared at him flabbergasted while the enthusiastic part of my brain quickly rewrote my speech and the stern part scolded the man for interrupting me before I’d gotten started.

I managed to stutter out “Oh, um, the toilet in the ladies’ bathroom overflowed.” Then I nearly lost my head and started babbling about how I’d gotten it to stop and it wasn’t a horrible mess, but I was saved by him looking very frustrated and saying, “Again?” “Yeah,” I said and tried to chuckle gaily as if I dealt with this sort of thing all the time and still had a scrap of dignity; it probably sounded like I was choking. I beat a retreat and the kids and I rode the elevator up to our room.

A normal person would have just been glad that was all over with. A normal person would have put that story away in the dark corners of his mind and forgotten all about. Me? I just couldn’t wait to tell someone the great tale of Gabrielle and the Toilet Who Just Couldn’t Stop.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 20th, 2009 at 10:35 pm and is filed under For Amusement Purposes Only, Gabrielle, Life, Children and Dishes, Not Much of Anything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.