So I started to try to make this all funny and poetic like most of the stuff in the Pit, but evidently I am not funny OR poetic.
Here is the deal. Several of my friends and I get together every week. We pray together for an hour and play video games for an hour (we call it pray and play - I didn’t name it). So I go to the bathroom and floating in the bowl is a used tampon. Okay, no big deal. I don’t care to see this, but I am a grown man. I have been married for 8 months now. I can handle it. I go the the bathroom, flush it and move on (of course, the toilet tries to over flow when I do this. Okay, no big deal. I don’t care to see this, but I am a grown man. I have been married for 8 months now. I can handle a toilet filled with urine and tampon overflowing in my friends bathroom. But that is not the point of the story).
The point of the stoty is: leaving a used tampon in the toilet when 5-10 of your husbands male friends are coming over for a regularly scheduled event that we do every Tuesday at the same time is Trifling (notice the capital T). Especially since some of us mentor teenegers and often bring them along. Teenagers are not grown men who have been marrried 8 months (this ain’t Kentucky) and will not be able to handle the situation with the grace and quick thinking that I showed. Also, you shouldn’t make your guests plunge your toilet. If this is too hard for you, I have repeatedly offered the use of my home. I will flush the toilet before you come over. Or perhaps you couild post a sign.
I like the OP for its instructive use of a regional idiom! When I clicked on the thread title, I thought it was going to be a rant about “trifling” people in the sense of “airheaded”, “shallow”, “obsessed with trifles”, “trivial”, “flippant”, and so forth. Basically, people who don’t have the gravitas or perceptiveness to treat serious things seriously.
Then I read the OP and discovered it was calling somebody “trifling” for forgetting to flush a tampon.
“What the hey?” I asked myself. “What in the world is ‘trifling’ about that? Careless, yes. Thoughtless and inconsiderate, quite arguably. But not particularly shallow or flippant or un-serious in any way. How do you get from feminine-hygiene-malfunction to ‘trifling’?”
And then I remembered my roommate from North Carolina who would use the term for people who were just generally being dopes or jerks or doing anything that was stupid. “Those folks are just trifling.” With the great NC accent, of course; “traaafling”.
And then I look at the OP’s location, and lo and behold it’s SE US. Aha, now I get it! Cool!
And yeah, sorry to hear about the tampon in the toilet. I fear, though, that you have opened a door here for everyone to come in and tell their favorite feminine-hygiene-malfunction stories. Don’t worry, I’ll spare you mine.
And on behalf of my gender, sorry for EVER leaving the toilet seat up.
Maybe she did, and maybe it did.
What I am saying is, when you have guests coming over, it seems that you should, you know, make sure you place is ready for visitors. When I have guests over, I wander through the house and make sure that things are somewhat neat and tidy, that there is a roll of TP available in the bathroom, that the the toilets are flushed, I have clean glasses for thirsty guests. That kind of thing.
I didn’t say (or mean to imply) that this was the end of the world or caused me to suffer from PTSD. I don’t even know where that came from. What I did say was that not preparing your house for guests is trifling. And it is extra annoying that I had to plunge someone elses stopped up toilet (unless you think I stopped it up. Nope, I didn’t). You know, DianaG, sorry that you got all upset about the word “tampon” - but it is not about the fact that it was a tampon. It is the fact that there was anything there at all. Are you telling me you don’t find it gross at all if you go in behind someone and they left a turd in the bathroom? And that your annoyence does not grow if you try to just flush it and the toilet overflows?
My OP (I wouldn’t call it a rant) may have been “weak” in that I didn’t cuss or anything, but I think it is a perfectly valid situation to get annoyed about.
I learned it in basic training. My Drill Sgt. used the term whenever we did something was just thoughtless, usually affecting other people. The term just always stuck with me. I didn’t think it was regional. I am from Southern California, and whenver I go home I use the term and people seem to know what I am talking about.
My first thought when I walked in the bathroom was "Why is this even in the toilet. My wife places them in the garbage. Oh well, I wasn’t gonna fish it out.
Honey, I made a big deal of it being a tampon because *you * made a big deal of it being a tampon.
And a teenager would have what, run screaming from the room and rocked back and forth in the corner for a couple of hours until you could talk him down?
And for the record, I have occasionally encountered plumbing problems at other people’s houses. I don’t think any less of them for it. And I assume that if they’d *known * about the problem, they probably would have warned me off that bathroom. So I’m guessing she didn’t actually intentionally leave that there just to traumatize you and/or any teenage boys you might have had in tow.
My original post wasn’t actually intended harshly. But dude… it’s just a tampon.
Yeah, you kind of whooshed me with the Post TAMPON Stress Disorder. Pretty good. Sorry if I over reacted.
But…
As I said before, it wan’t about the tampon, it was about the fact that anything was there at all. I was a LITTLE extra bugged by the fact that it was a tampon - but I think that almost any man would be. I was annoyed that I had to look at something (exhibit A better for you?) that someone else left in the toilet, and further annoyed that I had to plunge the toilet.
Note that I didn’t say ex-friend. Still my friend. Note I didn’t say anything about being tramatized. You did. I said it was trifling. If you didn’t understand what that meant cool, but a few posts up it is explained. I never said they did this on purpose. I said that they SHOULD have wondered around the house and TIDIED UP.
You know, you really are reading a heck of a lot into the OP. Maybe they would have gone to the wifes room, knocked on the door and said, “Hey, get your tampon out of the bathroom so I can piss!” Maybe she would have been embarassed. I don’t know. My experience with teenagers is that they rarely handle ANYTHING as well as an adult. From ordering at McDonalds to dealing with OPM (other peoples messes).
Tampons are flushable you know. Depending on the brand though, the applicator may not be. I used tampons for many years, and never plugged a toilet with one, unless there was also excessively huge amounts of toilet paper being flushed with it.
Think about it. Tampons aren’t that big, and they’re soft when submerged in water. Plenty of times a bowel movement would be much bigger than a tampon. Do you not flush then?
Just to clarify, I don’t think that the tampon caused the overflow. When I flushed, the toilet immediatly overflowed. It appeared to me that soemthing before the tampon was clogging. I meant to that put in the reply to Lord Ashtor. Not sure where it went. Sorry.
