Toilet Appreciation

What a piece of work is the modern commode!

Incredibly, my discourse on toilets a couple of years ago remains the single most visited post on this entire blog, according to the blogspot counter (although the dump festival is catching up). It's quite puzzling, although I've speculated on why it may be.

I had to fix our toilet again the other day. This time the lift arm snapped. It was a cheap piece of plastic, so of course it gave up the ghost after fewer than ten thousand flushes.

But I had that usual sense of wonder – how ingenious an invention is the toilet! What happens when you flush? You press a lever. That activates the lift arm, which pulls a chain, which lifts the rubber flapper, which lets all the water in the tank rush into the toilet bowl, which by weight of water forces the contents of the bowl through the outflow passage and into a mystery tube, and thence our pristine water supply.

Or something like that.

Anyway, I had to replace the lift arm. As luck would have it I already had a toilet repair kit. But it was the same kind I used before, so I wound up replacing the old cheap lift arm with a new cheap lift arm.

The whole process only took a few minutes. It was easy; I didn't need any tools, didn't have to consult a repair manual, or search for a YouTube video.