Sitka or Bust: Commute The World

I’d been working my new florist gig for a few weeks when the john broke. Of course, we were also dealing with a swell in business. To put it linearly, a high influx of customers->high arrangement output = many people working at the shop at once to accommodate it all.

When many people work in a tiny box, many people use the tiny bathroom. This gets really difficult when you add into the equation the digestive failures on everyone working there, plus a malfunctioning commode. We started out innocently enough and just filled ten gallon buckets with water to aid the flushing potential. Its like the toilet was just getting sick of our shit, pardon the pun.

Weeks passed with the toilet remaining a sporadic asshole. I began praying not to need it while at work because it occasionally regurgitated toilet paper and pure embarrassment, among other things. I stopped drinking water and somehow made it my mission to only need to poop when i had been sent on a shop mission (AKA walmart journey). This was after, of course, I had to meekly walk next door and ask the nail salon if I could christen theirs. Never again.

It seemed like it was not high priority on the bossman’s list to fix and I was getting frustrated, so one day we bought our own toilet on the company card and I was nominated most likely to succeed at plumbing maintenance and installation.

First off, the bathroom is carpeted. Second, the carpet was soaking wet from weeks of “mysterious leaking.” Third, I was game.

I had to go back to my place to get my toolbox because of course we don’t have many ye olde shoppe tools. I brought back my crap work clothes and grit my teeth when my knees soaked through on the carpet, even after putting down some of our stockpile cardboard. No dice. I watched a YouTube tutorial on my phone and ripped that broken sucker out of the ground with my bare hands and a voracious desire to poop.

That, my friends, is a poop-chute.

Surprisingly, it was extremely simple. I shut off the water, ripped off the tank, unbolted the bottom, unscrewed the water hose, and carried it all out to the dumpster. I’m grossed out to say the toilet water that I couldn’t scoop out dripped onto my shoe on the way to the grave. Maybe as a last act of defiance. A vomit of putrid resignation.

Luckily it was a really hot day, like reallllllly hot. There’s a wax ring that seals the bottom to the floor and it needs to be melty to go on so I left the brand new wax ring on the bed of a truck for a bit while I cleaned up the previous wax ring.

My first fix in the flower shop. Not pretty.

There was a small kerfuffle as I shimmied the new toilet into the tiny bathroom and thought briefly that it was just a hair too big. I mean I measured it multiple times, but it just didn’t look right. In the end though, it fit and was only not flush with the wall by a hair.

I consider it a success for my first foray into modern plumbing (well, besides the sink in the front of the shop). It was also just really nice to do something different for a day.