My Toilet Plunger

Toilet plungers are something we don't think much of until we need them. As such I didn't think much of it when I had the plunger from our Virginia home packed into our sea shipment bound for Singapore. I didn't analyze it when I unpacked it or stored it unused for over a year here.

Lately we have been burning through the rolls of toilet paper around here though. I've asked them to stop wasting. I remind them - their forgetfulness in flushing reminds me often to remind them. Despite my efforts and patient, kind prodding I still seem to be changing a roll about every 1.5 days anyway. Sadly that's not an exaggeration.

This week the deal breaker finally happened. They clogged the toilet. I happened to use the toilet after Jacob and nothing would go down. My first sense was that Jacob had put a toy down it. He's been trouble lately to say the least. He digs through drawers and finds things and moves them, hides them or throws them away at his pleasure with no regard to its purposes or necessity. It's driving me mad. Of course he was my prime suspect plus he was the last one in there.

I softly probed and tried to get a confession from him by simply going straight at WHICH toy or object he had put in and flushed. No luck. Brian even came over and he couldn't persuade him to confess. He said Maddie did it. So I asked. Nope.

Then it occurred to me there was quite a bit of toilet paper. Maybe it was beyond a little bit floating in the bowl and it was jammed. The roll was low and I had put yet another full one on the roll just the day before. It didn't take long to figure out once we asked her, though she denied breaking the toilet - because toilet paper can't break stuff can it? Did you use three squares? No. Did you use lots. Kind of. Finally Brian went for it. Did you just roll and roll and roll it right into the toilet for a long time. Yep.

With our culprit discovered it was time to manage the mess of unclogging the thing. I retrieved the plunger from the storage out back and saw instantly we had a problem. My plunger is round. The toilet hole isn't. It has a rectangular hole that has about a 2-3 inch drop before it turns into a round hole at the very bottom.

How do you get a round plunger to work effectively on a rectangular hole?it didn't work fantastically but I did get it to squash down in and eventually force the mess to clear. But then I was terribly curious - what kind of toilet plungers do they sell here?

So I found one at the store on Friday while I was looking for a replacement squirt bottle. Jacob took the one poor Gina uses for ironing clothes and unscrewed the cap a week or two ago and apparently she's been doing her best with a rotten one. That Jacob is a stinker!

Anyway, it turns out they sell round plungers just like the one we already have. They don't exactly fit the toilet hole but I guess in a pinch they do eventually work.