Flushed Away: Ghosts of Weekends Past

Published September 17, 2007

By Lea McLellan

There are some mysteries within a suite that are best left unsolved. Like why I find myself picking long, curly, blonde hairs off my towel when my own hair is short, straight, and brown. Or who clogged the bathroom sink with waffle batter. But this was one strange situation that refused to be ignored… mostly because it backed up our toilet for two weeks.

Like most mornings, I awoke to the ear-piercing beeps of a dump truck backing up and the cawing of that damn bird that hangs out near my window. My suitemate’s late night of laughing and slamming doors, the truck, and the bird left me with a general pissed off feeling as I kicked away my sheets and groggily walked over to the bathroom.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that I was standing in toilet water. Next, I took note of the shampoo bottles, toothpaste tubes, and my Q-tips, which had been knocked over onto the wet floor. But the real head-scratcher was the plunger, bobbing around in the toilet with the rubber end flipped inside out. It looked like a big pink ladle that had been used, evidently, to pour dirty poop water everywhere. “ Wtf??” I thought, as I began to piece together the strange scene. There was no telling when my assumedly hung-over roomies would emerge from their rooms, so I was left to come up with my own theories as to why my bathroom had been ransacked.

I couldn’t come up with much. The way I saw it, somebody had gotten really wasted and decided to knock everything over. What happened next is hard to judge, but ultimately they plunged the hell out of the toilet. When they saw that their vigorous plunging had created the aforementioned “ladle effect,” they started flinging toilet water all over the place until they got tired and passed out. Needless to say, I was dissatisfied with my conclusion.

I know people can do some pretty weird things after a night of partying, but usually it’s more along the lines of an unfortunate hookup with that guy across the hall. You know… the one with the questionable hygiene. Or maybe if someone’s really unlucky they might fall down the stairs. But plunging?? It didn’t add up.

I didn’t have to wait long before the truth was revealed. I learned from a first-hand account, that my very nice, but very clumsy suitemate Rhonda* (*name changed), had flushed her cell phone down the toilet, not once, but twice. So there it sat. Her highly fashionable pink Razr was lodged deep in the plumbing of our suite, never to play its “ Fergalicious” ring tone again.

To make matters worse, my suitemate chose to flush her phone in the bathroom she never uses. It wasn’t easy, but we forgave her. No one wants to call her parents after her first weekend at college to tell them she flushed her phone. But it would take more than our pity to bring her phone back to light.

Two weeks passed without any word from the plumbers. By that point, I had long given up hope of ever taking a poop in our own toilet again. I was caught completely off guard the day I returned from class to see the mangled pink phone miraculously sitting on the counter. No one was there to ask the plumbers why they didn’t just throw the icky remains away, but I like to think they left it to teach us a little something about life.

Maybe, just maybe, leaving the phone was a symbolic gesture. I think they meant to remind us never to give up hope and that everything will work out in the end.

Either that, or an equally important life lesson: Try your best not to drop your cell phone in the toilet. And if it does happen… please don’t flush.

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