I’ve never witness this catastrophic event or been the cause of it [as far as I know]. From what I hear, it’s bad enough to make people dread using the work bathroom or public washrooms, for fear of the Overflow Monster.
Personally, the only thing I’ve seen with a clogged toilet is the water rise up rather high. I then get the… springy thinger… um… oh! I get the plunger and fix it. As a side note: Am I the only one who’s… well, anal about rinsing the plunger off really well in the clean toilet water?
Is it just a little trickle of water that spills over the side if the toilet is clogged?
Or is it, by God, a Monsoon of Poo?! A Flood of Feces? A Tornado of Tinkle?
So, come. Tell me. What happens, where have you done it, what did you do to fix it?
You know you want to share.
I will now end this post with a brief note to our beloved moderator.
Dear Czarcasm,
I am very, very sorry for subjecting you to yet another poo thread. Pleasepleaseplease don’t lock it, as I’m very curious about the above-mentioned occurences. I promise to make more high-brow posts from now on. If you let this thread stay open, I will write “I will not make poo posts in Czarcasm’s forum from now on” 100 times. I will also ask Santa to bring you more posters who start non-gross threads and who will never, ever ask what WTF LOL means.
What happened when my SO’s mother’s toilet overflowed: he spent all night mopping nearly the entire upstairs, and attempting to dry the carpeting downstairs. The next day he and I spent several hours moving furniture and mopping the floors again with Lysol, and scrubbing down the walls where it had run down from the ceiling. They were somewhat lucky that the entire upstairs is hardwood flooring. The carpet ended up being thrown out. There is still paneling downstairs that I’ve bugged him about removing; I’m sure the drywall underneath is not in good shape.
This was an unusually bad overflow though. SO’s mother had a stroke some years back, and is not in full possession of her faculties. When the toilet clogged, she kept flushing and flushing, not understanding why it wouldn’t drain properly. Her husband and my SO had gone to run an errand at the time and came home to find the mess. As they were soaking up the first flood, she went and flushed the toilet AGAIN, causing a second flood. They hadn’t gotten to unclog the toilet or shut the valve yet. :smack:
Toilet overflow is one of the biggest phobias I have, 3rd only to my car running out of gas and those “technical difficulties-please stand by” messages that TV stations run.
We had this problem last summer, of course on the hottest week of the year. The toilet started kinda glogging down slowly for a few days, then lo and behold one day the water just kept coming up and didn’t stop!!
Not only does whatever is in the toilet bowl come flowing out (VERY disgusting), but we also had the lovely problem of the same gook backing up into our bathtub!!! Yes, the BATHTUB! Luckily I had already taken my shower that day.
Hubby thought he could fix it, but when I came home from work there was the Mr. Rooter truck in front of the house. Turns out there was a clog some 25 feet down the pipe that decided to rear its ugly head. Toilet had to be taken out of the floor and the pipe snaked out. $200 later we could safely flush again. Have no idea what caused the clog but my theory is there were some feminine products flushed down by a guest we had the week before (definitely not by me!!).
After much mopping with bleach the toilet was reattached and things have been fine since.
I have a phobia of being at someone’s house, or at work or a party or a public restroom, and overflowing the toilet. We had really old plumbing at the house I grew up in, and every so often it would clog… and everything would start creeping up and over. It seemed like it was always my fault, meaning I was the last to flush. As it is now, I can never relax when flushing a toilet until everything has disappeared and the water has risen to its normal level and stopped.
When I lived with my dad briefly several years ago, the “main line” between the house and the street clogged up and flooded the basement. Emergency plumber arrived and snaked the drain, pulling up toilet paper, tree roots and poo particles. F’ing narsty, that was. And it’s still going on! My bro owns the house now & he’s had to have the damned thing snaked at least three times. And that’s after he got the main replaced (which involved digging up a third of the front yard)
Yeah I had this happen to me at a friends house. My most embarassing moment ever.
I went to a party in my college roomates home town. Much drinking was involved. Anyway the next morning I got up and felt a pain down there. You know the pain after lots of beer the night before where you just know it isn’t going to be pretty. Oh yeah runny beer poo. Lots of it.
I flush and the water starts to rise. I feel the blood rush from my face and panic strikes but I think, “There has got to be a plunger”. Right? Right?!! Ummm… No!! No plunger. The water starts to seep over the edge. Get a towel I think to wrap it around and that will hold it. Ummm… No Towels either. OMG. OMG. What now. Poo is now flowing down the side. I mean who doesn’t have any towels in the bathroom! THe water stops but it’s way too late. I have to face the music.
I go to the living room and I can’t even make eye contact. “Dude, I really screwed up and made a mess. S*** is every where.”
“Oh man I forgot to tell you not to S*** in there. It clogs up you have to use the other room!”
“Thanks I figured that out on my own.”
Worse than all of that his dad refused to let me clean it up so he did!! I insisted but he was more stubborn. It was his house and they had forgotten to tell me or so he said.
Well it was clear I could never set foot in that house/town ever again.
When the toilet threatens to overflow I quickly take the top off the toilet tank and stop the water. Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing sits on tank for that very reason. I’m not going waste time slapping what-nots out of the way so I can get to the water thingy. Same with plunging- I can do that after the water stops and goes down a bit. I’ve been fast and lucky so far. Fortunately it’s only been about once a year the past few years and a good plunging seems to fix the works.
I am very, very sorry for subjecting you to yet another poo thread. Pleasepleaseplease don’t lock it, as I’m very curious about the above-mentioned occurences. I promise to make more high-brow posts from now on. If you let this thread stay open, I will write “I will not make poo posts in Czarcasm’s forum from now on” 100 times. I will also ask Santa to bring you more posters who start non-gross threads and who will never, ever ask what WTF LOL means.
Love,
chatelaine"
I don’t think that’s good enough. Now, if you made it your siggy…
I only ever encountered this once so far in my life. I was staying in a hotel in NYC, and having finished operations, I stood and flushed. The water didn’t go down as it should, just filled up. Once it reached the base of the rim of the toilet it obviously stopped the siphon from shutting off, and water just kept flowing into the bowl, gradually carrying it’s foul little passenger closer to escape from the bowl. Panicing now I threw alll the hotel towels on the bathroom floor to try to soak up the flow of water that was now cascading over the sides.
It was at that point that a moment of inspiration came to me, I had to stop the water entering the cistern. Quickly I ripped the lid off the cistern and used a hotel pen to jam the ballcock in the up position, thus shutting off the valve. One call to reception later, one generous tip to the unfortunate member of staff sent to clean up the mess, and all was well.
Of course, I have since had to endure notoreity amongst my circle of friends as an English guy who blocked an American toilet. :eek:
My sister has clogged the toilet in every, I mean EVERY hotel room we’ve ever been in together. She’s clogged toilets in Mexico, toilets in Wisconsin Dells, toilets in North Carolina! It’s always a flood and we have to change rooms!
I don’t know what she’s doing, she says she does nothing unusual, no feminine products flushed or anything.
I’m begining to think that when she’s out of town, she craps Quick Set cement.
Holy crap [sorry!], I guess it really is a tidal wave of pee. I’m now rather glad we live in an apartment with cement floors. Just in case…
Since I’ve never managed to do it, I wonder if my poo is extra small. Well, we don’t put TP in the toilet, so maybe that’s why. Apparently our septic system is not-so-swell, so the TP has to go into the wastebasket.
Let’s see… but then… I’d get banned for having such a big signa–
:dubious: :eek: :mad:
While clever, your evil ruse was not enough to trick me!
Any toilet I have ever been in danger of overflowing always has had the water shutty offy thing ( yes, that is a technical term ) around the back of the base of the toilet on the pipe. Do others not have this?
Oh god. Oh god. One of my summer jobs was in a truck-stop Mobil station and, let me tell you, plunging a toilet clogged by a neverending chain of truckers is the stuff of nightmares.
Every few days or so someone would come to the front, where I was fanning myself and trying to do the NYTimes crossword: “Uh, ma’am, the toilet in the bathroom is clogged.” And this was never the perpetrator, no, this was the next poor soul entering the bathroom, attempting to do one’s business, and then realizing that the ()&%&# who used it last was too much of a &*$)% to alert someone to the problem. So I would sigh, put down my paper, and drag my dainty, dimunutive, feminine self (at least in comparison to these trucker men) to do the plunging they don’t want to do. It was a complete reversal of normal gender roles. It was all up to me.
Sometimes the water hadn’t actually overflowed, and only seemed cloudy in color. These were the best of times. Sometimes, horror of horrors, the overspilled substance was a murky and stomach-turning brown, and continuing to slowly pour over the rim. These were the worst of times.
Luckily, I quickly learned the art of the plunge and now consider myself an expert. I fear no toilet, public or private! And it’s a special triumph to emerge from the small, dubious truck-stop bathroom, hair pulled back, cheeks a little pink, standing tall on my sensible sneakers and low-cut jeans, and announce to the men waiting, “all set!”
For a while I considered myself somewhat of a superhero…
The trick is to know exactly where the shut off valve is on the pipe and know exactly how you will get to in a hurry if you need to.
A couple of summers ago I lived in a little old house with very old and bad plumbing. One day I was doing laundry and flushed the toilet. It was a poop explosion. It came out of the toilet, the shower (there was no bathtub), and the bathroom sink. It soaked the carpets. It was a nightmare. So I did what any self-respecting woman would do, I started crying and went and got the maintenance man. My landlord also owned the apartments across the street, so mainenance man was handy. I never did do laundry at that house again, I was too scared.
Once when I was an exchange student in Francophone New Brunswick I went with my host family to the grandparents’ (maternal/paternal…I can never remember) house. Went to the washroom and yes, it clogged and the water kept rising and, yes, there was #2 and I had to rush out of there and try to figure out how to express all this to my host parent’s parents in French. Luckily they got to it in time. :o
I’ve had that happen to me twice within the span of a couple weeks. It made me extremely jumpy after that. If I hear the toilet running when I think it’s not supposed it will wake me up from a cold slumber to go investigate it.
My grandma did it both times. Both times I was out of the building and she didn’t notice so it overflowed for … well maybe hours. We live in an apartment building so both times this poor guy two floors down got it too. Thankfully he was VERY understanding. Thankfully I’m not too much of a neat freak about certain things. As when my bed, which at the time was one the floor, got soaked I was able to lug it outside to dry off with the reasoning that by that time it was essentially just tap water. Also I was able to unzip the outer covering of the bed and machine wash it. I borrowed a water sucker outer thing from the building manager and sucked most of the water out and kept the windows open to help things dry out faster.
I was pretty much able to shrug things off. I think she was throwing paper towels down the toilet. I stopped buying paper towels, or rather I left them where she couldn’t get at them and it never happened again. Those days were not fun.
:dubious: :eek: :mad: