Don’t quite know where to start…. I am still a bit paralyzed with the heebie-jeebies (make that, the screaming heebie-jeebies). Was sitting on the porcelain throne doing my business. Alone. Or so I thought. I was just wrapping up the paperwork (no job is truly finished until the paperwork is done) when I heard this gurgling noise. A single, ominous, douloup!
I instinctively stood up to avoid getting my posterior et al dampened by any nefarious splashing when I saw a scene unfold before me that has captured my heart in an icy prison. Though adrenaline is a wonderful drug when administered voluntarily, the unexpected torrent recently released upon my system is draining away all too slowly.
Gentlemen of the board, I warn you to read on at your own peril. Though nothing physical happened, the thought of what could have happened - the unstoppable scenarios that inevitably play out in our minds when we consider the possibilities - will send an empathetic fire racing along nerve pathways that at the very least will cause spontaneous leg crossing, and may leave the more imaginative of you doubled over in agony.
I stood up… I turned… I expected to see the biological Rorschach that was my past meal. I saw….
A RAT
::cue ominous music, lightning strikes, hysterical screams::
Yes, within inches of good ‘ol Sigmund and the Seamonsters, (inches damnint!) was a large (about seven inches of body) grey, slimey, shit-coated FUCKING RAT! Please please please excuse my language at this late hour, I hope the relevant circumstances allow me this literary indiscretion. But had I been an instant slower on the uptake… had the rat been a fraction more… ohmygod… more…. hungry and I would be writing to you now not as a man in terror, but as a man insane.
I must stop here lest this turn into an MPSIMS… I write this to GQ with the question – now what?!
What the hell do we do the next time we have to void? What is my lovely flower of a girlfriend supposed to do when she is up late studying? How do we keep a (filthy rotten disgusting) rat out of our plumbing?! How do we keep the rat out, yet not be overwhelmed in our own effluence? We live in an apartment in DC with a semi-responsive landlord, so I may end up having to take matters in my own hand… please help. Sanity and sanitation may depend on you!
First off, I’m SO sorry, good grief what a shock!! Like a Stephen King scary ending come alive. If you can’t get your landlord moving on this, then you tell him that you’re calling the Department of Health, and then DO IT. Don’t wait. This is what I would consider an emergency. You could put poison in there now, and kill the little monster. Keep the lid covered with some kind of garbage sack, to suck any extra air. But however the thing got IN, it most likely could get out too.
Bless your heart. I can’t imagine EVER going to the bathroom again.
Good luck,
And do come back with what happened, I’m going to be looing askance at my own commode now, and it’s a closed in septic system! :mad:
Actually, I’d call up a plumber and ask them for the draino equivalent that goes down toilets (if you can find a plumber that will talk to you sooner than next leap year).
I’m definitely a bit out of my league here, but I think that the sucker might have been able to come in from above rather than below (eg entered your building’s system through a vent rather than by climbing up from the sewers). In which case, you might just have to find the vent with its cover askew and fix it.
I will now go gird my boys with my cup and shudder in a corner far away from any toilets. Good lord, man, you are a lucky SOB.
First, you must establish whether the rat fell into the toilet or crawled up through the plumbing. Is the rat sporting your custom paint job or the factory’s? If you can figure it out, the former suggests that he has been cohabitating with you. He may have done some diving while you were doing your business in an effort to escape. The latter has a silver lining: at least your drain pipes aren’t clogged. One possible way of testing is to do the polite thing in the future and keep the lid closed at all times. Lift the lid up and spot Mickey again, and you know that they’re using the pipes for transit, which is not uncommon.
You might try this: keep the lid down all the times, pour a significant amount of chlorine bleach into the bowl, and make sure to flush it before you enthrone (you don’t want a base backsplash on ol’ Sigmund).
On the other hand, a rat living in your pipes who just had his eyes burned out with bleach is going to look for the very first place to get out of the water. That would be the Seamonsters.
A third possibility is that you don’t have rats. You have a Congressman.
I think that in order to solve this problem, it will require you to move out of that building, and get some therapy. I know that if it were me this happened to, I would never want to go near a toilet again. I am shivering in fright.
It is the policy of this Message Board that persons terrorized by a rat coming unexpectedly close to one’s unprotected family jewels are permitted to use whatever language they choose in the OP.
On another subject, I’d suggest that you’ll get more and better responses to your query if the thread title better describes your question. Do you have any objections if I change it?
A woman we know woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. She went. She got up to flush. She glanced down. There was a HUGE snake curled up in the bowl. She ran screaming. They moved (seriously).
I’m really sorry for what happened to you, but I don’t really have any advice except to get the exterminator over there posthaste.
I hope everyone here got more sleep than I did last night! Thanks for the responses and concern. The landlord called me at the office today to tell me she spoke with the kind folks at ‘Vector Control’. Now that is an interesting name for a city office. They promised to put traps in the sewers (and what would a fair wage for that job be?). I am generally an optimist, but this is the DC City Government we are talking about here.
As for poison, I don’t think I can bring myself to pour a bucket of De-Con down the loo. But I don’t think it will be too hard to convince myself that five or six industrial strength Tidy-Bowl tablets won’t cause too much harm. Maybe the chemical smell will keep him out, maybe burn his eyes… maybe just dye him blue so all his little rat-buddies will pick on him till he runs away to the country.
So there are no such things as one-way valves for the throne? No Indiana Jones-type contraptions I can install? Connecting a 220V line to the pipes not a good idea? Will I ever be able to sit in relative peace and comfort again?
Whilst I was living in Cambodia, rats in the toilet were a pretty common problem (they loved to eat the soap as well!). The locals had a novel way of keeping the intruders out - they kept a dog in the bathroom at night. Unfortunately for you, over there the toilets are of the squat variety, so Rover could easily nab the rats from the bowl (The dog was kept pretty darn hungry by the family). I think it’d take a pretty well-trained pooch to reach into your standard Western loo (may I suggest some sort of terrier…) so I’m afraid you’ll either have to find out if Lassie is for hire, or find a new zip code.
I do sympathise with you - I did manage to eventually get used to the rats, but somehow the thought of one in my lovely Western dunny (that’s toilet to all you non-Antipodeans out there) gives me the chills.
Rats are vermin. They carry disease. “Vector” is the term for an organism that is involved in some manner of disease/infection that acts as a sort of carrier. I’m too lazy to grab a bio book right now, so let me give some examples.
Mosquitos are the vector for malaria (they carry around the little bugger that causes it in their saliva. it doesn’t hurt them, but it will most certainly hurt you when it is transmitted to you when they bit you).
Rats are the vector for bubonic plague (they carry around the ticks [also a vector] that harbor the little bugger that actually infects you).
So “vector control” would presumably be in charge of eradicating those pests which might potentially cause an epidemic if their populations grew too large.
Those Tidy Bowl™ tablets might just work. I’ve heard that when a sewer rat finds his path blocked by water, they will hold their breath and swim underwater to get past the blockage, but only if they can see light coming from the other side. The rat was probably using your toilet as an exit from the sewer. Therefore, the heavy dose of TB™ might darken the water enough so the rat won’t try to exit thru your apartment, but go to your neighbors instead. Either that or just poop in the dark.
don’t make me bust a scientific journal over your head, GaWd.
'course, it’s probably a good thing that you pointed that out before a few of the less enlightened of the teeming millions began to worry about contracting malaria this summer.
