Do your worst.
here’s my recent toilet horror story.
i bought a house aout a year and a half ago, and it’s been a constant project. i am always strapped for cash because of this.
my most recent undertaking has been the one and only bathroom. i was working on the shower at that point, and having no plumbing experience, i called a guy in to hook up the new valve. so after 45 minutes and 280 bucks later, my shower was ready to tile.
so i’m doing all this messy work, and i throw ONE paper towel in the toilet. just one. i flush it, and no problem. so i go ahead and use the toilet for a few days. then i start smelling sewage. i go down to the basement and find a 8’ wide puddle of raw sewage.
at this point, i’m seriously broke, after calling the first plumber maybe 3 days prior. so first, i try some chemicals, because i really don’t want to get into that puddle. yeah, chemicals are bad, dangerous, whatever… but i don;t want ot get into that puddle.
so i get some really evil looking sulphuric acid stuff. no cute label, just a white bottle wrapped in a plastic bag. i pour two of those bad boys into the drain. smoking commences. and a distinctive sulphur smell that rivals the sewage odor.
i end up staying with my girflriend that night so i can actually use the facilities, since all the plumbing in my house is out of commision. and i figure theses chemicals will take care of the job if given time, because i have used them before.
i get back the next day, and nothing has changed. so now, i have no other choice than to get into that puddle. but now there’s acid in it. so i turn on the house and water it down a bunch, and don some gloves, boots, glasses, stuff like that, and get out the snake.
as soon as i get down there, calf-deep in this stuff, my gag reflex takes over. i’m doubled over dry heaving for about 10 minutes until i can compose myself. then i get to work with the snake.
i snake it down about 8 feet and hit a wall. i twist it, and it’s getting all kinked up, then the snake releases, and splashes me with a wave of raw sewage and toilet paper. but i have to keep going. i’m fishing out wads and wads of paper (and other stuff). all i flushed was one paper towel. but i think after 8 hours, yes, 8 hours of snaking, i pulled out about a plastic grocery bag full of paper. i guess it was just building up over time. anyway, after it all drained out my concrete floor was eaten away by the chemicals, but i guess the paper was just too much for it to handle. we then pured a gallon of bleach out on the floor to try and disenfect it.
after that, i ended up stripping in the back yard, throwing away everything i had on, and having my girfriend spray me with the hose. oh yeah, this was in october in indiana.
and the house still smelled for about a month after that.
Damn. Had both written up, only to be eaten by the hamsters. Will try again later.
I had a horrible experience with an overflow, once. Here’s a link to the thread I started about it (it’s OLD. DO NOT bump it, please.).
We eventually had to rent a ‘rug-doctor’ type carpet cleaning machine to suck out all the water that poured into the carpets adjoining the bathroom.
We compare the event to Voldemort in Harry Potter: The event of which we don’t speak.
This thread has made me laugh until I want to heave. True.
Muffin, you superseded my expectations. That story is hilarious.
Tranquilis… you win. I don’t know what you win, but you win. I… look forward to your other stories. I’m afraid, but I still look forward to them.
And, lieu, you never disappoint. I’m going to pull up that thread on Mrs. Chatelaine’s browser so it’ll be the first thing she sees when she gets home.
[hijack]
Hi, trublmakr! How are ya?
[/hj]
Keep 'em coming! Well, not literally. The stories, I mean.
I’m a northern Ontario fellow who likes to kayak about in needle boats that run at about a four minute mile pace. After screaming about, I get pretty hot, so I like to finish off a workout with a swim. In northern Ontario that is easily done. Hot? Just hop in. Thirsty? Just start drinking. The water is clean and cold.
So when I moved south for a few years for school, I checked in at a southern Ontario canoe club, and continued on with my practice of hard paddles followed by refreshing swims. The water was a bit silty, and didn’t smell too good, but seemed better than nothing.
Eventually, a kind soul pointed out to me that the culvert just upstream of the club was the city’s sanitary sewer overflow discharge, that spewed forth a city’s worth of deificate slurry on a regular basis due to the city’s infrastructure not being able to handle recent years’ population growth.
I’m glad to be back up north again.
Ok… Let’s try this again.
Sea Story #3
On submarines, the Sans tank is provided with two over-hull fittings: One low, to be used out to sea (ensuring the fecal matter goes down into the water, even if the boat is on the surface), and the other high on the hull, so a flange with a hose fitting can be attached, allowing the tanks to be blown to a holding and transfer facility. When blowing Sans in port, there’s always someone watching the over-hull fitting to ensure that any disasters get reported instantly. One foreign port in which we stopped, there was this yard worker whom used to sit on the pier to eat his lunch. You already see where this is going, I’m sure… I was the watch, up on bridge, when we were blowing tanks one day, about the same time the old guy sat down to eat his lunch. The flange failed, and the poor SOB got sprayed with fermented human waste. He looked like he’d been dipped in chocolate. The smell, of course, was something else entirely. Sans smell nastier than any other smell I’ve ever smelt, and I’ve been around the world twice. That particular cleanup is something I don’t much care to remember, though it wasn’t quite so hard on the victim as opening the ball valve in the head would have been. OTOH, the ball-valve victim has only his self to blame, while this guy only made the mistake of sitting down in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Sea Story #4
This happened before my time, but I’ve seen the photos.
My old boat was doing “hunt you/Kill me” excercises with a destroyer when the San tanks became full. The skipper (same one in charge when I checked aboard) asked for permission to break away and take care of ‘housekeeping’ evolutions, like: Blowing the Sans. The destroyer’s skipper, who was senior, said ‘No.’ Now, Captain Peterson was a crusty, agressive sort. He pulled the boat alongside the destroyer and broached her; that is, brought the sail clear of the suface. He then directed the blowing of Sans. Via the upper connection. The first picture, taken through the 'scope, shows a grey destroyer close alongside, with crew on the deck point at us. The second shows a brown spray/cloud obscuring the scope. The third picture shows a grey and tan destroyer steaming almost directly away from the 'scope.
There were, apparantly, no official repercussions, though the guys who were aboard when it happened say that there were no more issues with housekeeping requests. 
I wouldn’t have believed the second story, if I hadn’t seen the pictures myself.
That’s one heck of an insight into submarine warfare!
Heh!
We’re just a buncha boys with one big, nifty toy! OK, so sometimes it shits on us, or on someone else, but hey, who hasn’t had that happen at a frat party…?!
Most of the rest of my shit stories revolve around middling-sized spills of SHT, minor pip ruptures, and so on. Oh, and the occasional incident where a San tank backs up into someone’s bunk, ruining everything they have onboard the ship or boat… 
Real world: the gleaming shiny Nav is full of all manner of mundane and gross realities. You sould see some of the prnaks we got up to.
Geez. Can’t type at all tonight.
When I was young and naive and knew not Cecil, I overflowed a toilet in the upstairs bathroom in our house, by flushing repeatedly when it wouldn’t flush. The water overflowed and went into the heating vent in the floor. It came out from the heating vent in the ceiling of the downstairs bathroom, where my mother was drying her hair. She got a rain of toilet-contents on her head :eek:
Well, I had one experience I wrote up here with a followup here.
Fortunately, I found out what was causing the repeated overflows since then and have managed to prevent a re-occurance.
Ohh, I have a good one.
While in college, me and 3 other roomates shared a ground-level apartment in a rather large 4 story building. There was a utility closet in our living room that was always locked (management told us they had issues with tenants abusing the air handlers, so they kept it locked). The door was one of those bi-level doors - you could actually open the bottom to access/change the air filter, but not the top.
We found out the hard way that the closet also housed the central waste pipe that served all the other apartments in our quadrant of the building.
Essentially, everytime someone flushed the toilet, it was routed to the sewer through this pipe next to our living room. Until it burst (not a leak, it really blew out at the bottom seam), in hich case the sewage was routed directly to our living room. It was a big pipe, and the mess was huge. And yes, you could see everything - turds, toilet paper, condoms, etc. We even had flies breeding out of it.
We had to move into another apartment. They replaced pretty much everything in the apartment, including our furniture.
Some rather nice (and cute) girls moved in that apartment about a month later. They were horrified when we told them that story.
I happened to once write a Pit thread about this very subject a while ago. Here it is:
Enjoy!!!