Toilet Troubles

The toilet in our master bathroom has been slow to fill since the day we moved in, but it wasn’t until we had to replace the flushing mechanism on our main bathroom toilet that we figured out why. It has a quiet feature on it. So, instead of doing a nice loud flush and filling up the bowl within a minute, we now have two low capacity toilets that flush at about half the regular volume and then take 5-10 minutes to refill. At first this was just annoying, but as it’s just the two of us and we don’t tend to have people over very often, it hasn’t been a big deal.

This weekend it became a big deal. This weekend my in-laws came over for dinner and brought with them one of my husband’s cousins who is visiting town. I’ve only met him once before and I am an INFJ after all, so I tend to be anxious about having everything work out perfectly when I have guests.

After dinner and before desert the usual toilet rounds began, first, my mother-in-law and, a few minutes later, me; I am pregnant after all and I do make a lot of trips into the bathroom. However, silly me, knowing about the flushing issue, went into the freshly cleaned main bathroom instead of going to the masterbath which hasn’t been cleaned in, let’s just say, a while. Of course, I flushed when I was done without realizing that the quiet flush still wasn’t done with it’s previous task and I only got half a flush out of it. There were still things whirling around in the toilet that needed to go down, which involved a long bathroom wait for the tank to fill sufficiently and I had house guests!

After waiting in the bathroom for about 5 minutes for things to fill up, I could stand it no more and stepped outside the door; guarding it so nobody else could go in. A few minutes later my husband’s nice polite cousin goes to take his turn at the facilities. I leap in his way and try to stutter a round-about explanation. Finally, I gave up. I mean, really, I cannot deny my guest access to the toilet. So, I led him into the yet barren and undecorated master bedroom in which I had stashed the entire mess from the rest of the house shortly before their arrival. I then led him to the doorway to the masterbath that has half a head of hair on the counter and a ton of dust hanging around in the corners.

This all was embarrassing enough. Only after he had closed the door did I realize that posted on the wall is the little chart that I have been keeping track of my pregnancy weight gain on for the past few months. Somehow, I maintained enough self-control to not throw open the door and rip the chart of the wall, but only just.

Surprisingly enough for a household of introverts, we had people over again tonight. I was very careful to use the masterbath when it was my turn and no further embarrassing events occurred. But let me tell you this, that darn flushing mechanism is getting changed, but quick!