When my toilet flooded for the second time in a week yesterday morning at 6:00 A.M, I wanted to argue with it. I wanted to chastise it for being so thoughtless during the holidays. Didn’t it know that I was out late the night before altruistically looking for presents for others? I did not deserve this gross bath at such an early hour.
What made it worse, was that my roommates and I had bought the cheapest plunger on earth, thinking that they were all the same. False. You need a plunger that has some give in its plastic head. It needs to provide suction to the water hole in your toilet and if it’s too thick, as ours was, you’ll soon find yourself pushing down on the plunger with all your weight, only to have it—yes—keep flooding. So, don’t be a cheap fool like I was, spend the extra money on a plunger of average quality and avoid all kinds of unpleasantness.
Also, keeping in mind when buying a bath rug that the inevitable will happen and one day your bathroom will flood – make sure the rug’s of the variety that can be washed. This tends to mean that the plastic on the back is constructed so it can withstand heat and that its edges are taped for durability.
Another natural disaster that struck me earlier this year was a plague of ants. My bedroom is far away from the kitchen and as I don’t eat food in my room, so I had no idea how they gained entry, but enter they did. And, crawl. While the traditional Raid helped, my landlord suggested the famous ‘ant motel’. You know, the “they check in but they don’t check out” variety? It might not be a bad idea to set a few motels up upon move-in as they’re visually innocuous enough. Spraying Raid along windows’ edges would also be a good preventive measure.
Hopefully you won’t have the crawly and gross wakeup calls I’ve had, but if you do, I have one final suggestion: your landlord’s phone number? Pin that baby to the fridge.
