When Toilet Seats Rust

NOTE: The below is a more-or-less accurate retelling of a home-improvement adventure that took place Monday, 10 May 2010.

Sometimes life requires us to take a step toward a direction we’d never imagined probable. The limits of what we know to be possible have failed and we are cast adrift, unable to get our bearing, no longer anchored to what we once knew as truth. So it was with me as I lay curled around the only toilet in our house, which sits wedged in between the bathtub and the rear exterior wall of our home. I had found myself in this position once before, some ten days prior when I had first tried to remove the old seat and lid. My wife had grown weary of ensuring Sarah’s potty chair was properly placed upon the seat only to have to remove it anytime someone other than a 2-year old needed to use the facilities.

I suppose she’d also grown tired of those moments of sudden, soggy realization when she realized that one of us had forgotten to replace the chair, resulting in our daughter creating puddles on the floor while she stood there naked struggling to lift up her throne. Wet socks never lie. A more elegant solution must exist, and my wife was determined to ferret it out before we were all swept away like Monsieur Noah in his 600th year. Fortunately, like many a town, we are blessed to have our very own super-duper Walmart which carries both everything you need and everything you don’t need.

While some of my more erudite friends, bon hommes et bonnes femmes all, turn their cultured noses up at the thought of setting foot in such temples of crass consumerism I am grateful for both the 500-odd jobs they provide for the area* and their wonderful selection of multi-purpose toilet seats that accommodate delicate posteriors and wizened rumps alike. I’m pretty sure my wife agrees as she brought one of these monuments to bathroom engineering home with her and left it sitting, not too subtly, on my desk. After a few days of peering over it to check my fantasy baseball results and pushing it aside so that I could scribble down random thoughts I’ve since forgotten, I decided to tackle the instillation project. Sadly, I immediately ran into a pretty substantial roadblock in the form of rust that had wedded the plastic nuts to the seat’s metal screws in holy matrimony. After a few minutes of attacking said nuts with wrenches and pliers while contemplating whether chaplains are allowed to swear (they’re not), I decided that not even death might part the two.

* Walmart is the largest private employer in our county, and third largest overall behind the Navy, which provides some 10,000 jobs.

As I noted above, ten days passed between this realization and a sudden epiphany brought on by the necessity of having to change my socks yet again. I could use WD40 to loosen those suckers! Well, OK, I’d thought of this idea previously, but like most men, I didn’t want to try it out right away for fear that it might actually work. You see, if I were to successfully install the new toilet seat on the first try, my wife would think that my accomplishment in doing so was relatively insignificant and I would open myself up to having my beloved assigning me another “honey-do” task when I clearly needed the time to obsess over my back-up second baseman’s inexplicable affinity for strikeouts and downright aversion to base hits.

Anyway, bottle of WD40 now in hand, I was ready to do battle with the evil Dr. Rust and his squad of beautiful Russian henchwomen. Just call me Ott. Peter Ott.* Neither shaken, or stirred, I boldly attacked the rusted bolts with WD40, drenching them with the kind of gusto I usually reserve for applying ranch dressing to my salads. Now, at this point, most people would tell you that you are supposed to wait and let the WD40 do its work, but I am a man. I immediately began assaulting the bolts with a wide variety of the most lethal weapons Navy chaplains are authorized to wield—the screwdriver and the exacto knife (along with the aforementioned wrenches and pliers).

*For the sake of my marriage, please note that despite my delusions of grandeur and wishful thinking that there were no Slavic lasses, not even babushkas with their hairy double-chins, anywhere near me.

While my efforts at brute force proved partly successful, I knew that I must reach deep in to my soul and appropriate an overused-90s management phrase that I first heard in my 9th grade math class. I must “think outside the box.” Specifically, I thought about the outside of the matchbox in my kitchen, and about that wonderful match-striking strip on its side. Yep, it was time to unleash the wrath of the fiery redhead-on-a-stick!

I won’t bore you with the rest of the details. Let’s just say that the smell of burning plastic and WD40 might not be the greatest thing my nose has ever had the pleasure of sniffing, but it still beat the smell of the microwavable pork rinds that my college roommate foolishly bought at the spur-of-the-moment during a late-night run to Walmart.* It also beat the smell of liquefied pig flesh that resided for a year in my twin brother’s refrigerator while he was deployed to Iraq. Even if he HAD kept the power on, I don’t think it would have helped much.

*OK, I know that I use way too many narrative asides, which I’ve mercifully footnoted for you, but really, are any ideas hatched late at night good ideas?

Fortunately for all parties involved (me), I had opened the bathroom window, so I don’t think that I lost any essential brain cells. Within five minutes I had the old toilet seat off and was ready to install the new one. My journal entry that evening read in part, “. . . installed a new child-friendly toilet seat (with the help of WD40 and an open flame).” Victory.