Man and Dog

Photo credit: R.G.

Letter From a Friend:

Dooley [that dog, right there] and I dropped a tennis ball down my toilet last night as it was flushing. He always drinks from there (won’t drink from his dish), so I make sure it is flushed. He came in from playing ball (with it in his mouth), so, knowing he’d be thirsty, I flushed it just in case it wasn’t totally fresh. Of course he put his head in there with the ball in his mouth, as he hates to let go of it unless he has to (why didn’t I anticipate that??). Well, you know the rest, and now the toilet is plugged. I reached my hand up there as far as it could go, but it was beyond retrieving. Now, not only can’t I use the toilet, but I have to dismantle the whole thing and hope like hell the ball didn’t make it into the lower pipes. Ordinarily, you’d use a snake (you probably know what that is) to get the plug out, but since it’s a tennis ball, that would only drive it further down the pipes. It will probably take 1,000 yrs for a tennis ball to break down in water. If the ball is not visible once I remove the toilet from the floor, I’ll have to tear apart the pipes in the basement until I find it. How dumb is that?!?!

I didn’t tell this story to anyone at work today, because its just too ridiculous. It should be impossible to flush a tennis ball down the toilet, because they float too well, and it shouldn’t really fit. Well, Dooley dropped it at just the right time, and I tried to grab it before it went down (with his head in the way), managing to give it just that little touch it needed to go fully in. I stood in disbelief after the ball vanished out of sight and didn’t come back up, and the water slowly stopped flowing. I flushed again, hoping it might go straight thru (a bad idea), almost causing a flood in the bathroom. Meanwhile Dooley is circling the toilet with his nose in the water because he knows his ball must be down there, barking because he wants me to get it out. Good grief.