Duh

A couple of weeks ago, the folks in the apartment above us had some bathroom issues. A pipe-problem of some kind was resulting in water cascading down through the wall and into the bathroom below ours (it's a mystery why the water skipped our bathroom--all three bathrooms are "stacked"). A plumber was summoned, who commenced to tearing into the floor of the upstairs bathroom and dismantling the offending pipes. While the original problem caused us no apparent harm, the effort to repair it did. Water drip-dripped from the ceiling right onto the seat of our toilet.

I had performed a thorough cleaning of the bathroom not a week prior and was, understandably, deeply distressed. The water came faster and faster and the mess spread. The building manager wasn't home and I didn't have her number, but I remembered that the management company had a sign on the outside of the building advertising an apartment for rent. So I strode indignantly out the front door, down the steps, and punched the numbers--indignantly--into my phone. I got a recording. The recording, however, did have the cell number for our on site manager, so I gave her a call and, having gotten through to someone--finally!--I vented my frustration. She promised to call the plumber in question and let him know what was going on. I promised to be offended and put-upon that my nice clean bathroom was at that moment being flooded with water and god-knows-what.

It was in one of my many pacings-by the bathroom that a solution--not to the dripping, but to the flooding--hit me. I could lift the lid to the toilet and let the water, etc., drip into the toilet instead of on it and the floor. Simple, yes, and I was surprised that I, being usually fairly adept at solving such problems, had overlooked such an obvious solution.

As I stood there looking at the soggy bathroom, it occurred to me that it was my haste to find an object for my wrath, an individual on which to pin the blame for the injustice of a sullied bathroom, and, on some level, a need to make the violation as dramatic as possible that led me to miss the opportunity to minimize the damage done. It would cheapen the moral of the story to pontificate here on the broader implications of this little revelation, so I'll refrain, and leave that to you, gentle reader. Assuming, of course, that anyone reads this.