The flight was very late and when my partner and I got home from the airport it was 2 AM; we were cranky and not in the mood for a domestic crisis. We walked into the house and were surprised that both cats came out to greet us: Generally after a trip they ignore us for several hours; this is our punishment for leaving them alone. Tonight however, they both ran to meet us, meowing at the top of their lungs and looking concerned. That’s when we noticed that their eight little feet were soaking wet. We looked at the cats, looked at each other and immediately rushed into the master bathroom, where we keep their litter box. The bathroom was under water.
Now, I’ve had my share of plumbing crises over the years, and I have to admit that as emergencies go, this was just middling. Thankfully the water had not spread beyond the tile bathroom floor, so I turned off the main valve and as I mopped up the water I saw a small crack in the toilet tank.
The next morning I called the plumber and then went to buy a new toilet. I knew exactly which one I wanted, because for some time I had had my eye on a sporty little model with a self-closing seat. The plumber arrived minutes after I got home from Home Depot with my treasure. “Why not install it yourself?” he asked; “Save yourself some money?”
I am not exactly Handy Andy around the house so I ignored this and ushered him into the bathroom where he saw the new toilet and gasped. “Why such a cheap one?” he said. He told me he had just installed a top-of-the-line model in his house with a remote control and a hard drive, but muttering darkly, he agreed to install our inferior model.
A minute later he called me. “Your new toilet is a piece of shit,” he said. He explained that our pipes were galvanized and our drain was off-center and this was going to take a while. I was getting nervous. “But can you do it?” I asked.
He laughed and told me that he had just finished single-handedly plumbing a huge house in Weston. I hate when service people spend time telling me about the enormous, upscale houses they have worked on, as if an opulent house somehow bathes them in a brighter light than a 1950’s ranch.
I cajoled the plumber back into the bathroom by promising him pastry when he was done with the job, but he came right back out. “Hey,” he said, “are you keeping that tacky old tile?” I assured him that that was my plan, and he shook his head. “I have Mother of pearl in my bathroom,” he said with satisfaction, “with copper inlays. Not this old ceramic crap.”
Nodding, I escorted him back to the bathroom and closed the door, debating the wisdom of moving the dresser in front of it, but I figured the dresser was not big enough to keep him in. Ninety minutes later he emerged and told me the new toilet was good to go. He escorted me to the bathroom with an air of accomplishment and flushed it several times. He told me that in over 20 years he had never had such a difficult installation and said installations like this were not cheap. He said it was lucky he came because in the hands of a less experienced craftsman it would have been a disaster. “I only cracked a couple of pieces of that tacky old tile,” he said.
He handed me the bill with a dramatic flourish and, apoplectic, I wrote him a check and then watched him drive away, a Danish in each hand. I walked back in the house, and sat down to stare morosely at my checkbook. Just then, the cat jumped into my lap. Her feet were soaking wet.