How to Remove a Potato from a Toilet
For those of you who truly want to know how to extract a potato that was flushed into a toilet, I’ve got?
you covered. The main reason I am writing this is not to teach you how to remove a potato from a toilet, but to
share the true creative, innovative, and intellectual joy I felt when I actually accomplished this feat.??
Neurotransmitters were shooting in my brain that I haven’t felt in years. Maybe people who work with their
hands feel like this every day?? Not sure.?
So the first thing that you have to know is that if you do put a potato into your toilet and you Google
things like “potato flushed toilet’ or “Potato clog toilet” there are comments on message boards from 2011 or so
that say things like:
"I believe I have the easiest fix of all: threaten to sue the landlord and share pictures on social media."
‘Wait two months. The potato will rot eventually’
“An M80”
Accepting that I was on this mission on my own (alas, I have no landlord to sue) (with my wife helping?
me move the toilet and my son, the offender, helping me with the garden hose, as I will eventually get to, I?
thought the solution would be to get what is sometimes referred to as a toilet snake.?
It has a fairly sharp rubber arrowhead. You turn the wheel. The snake goes down and cuts through whatever?
is stuck. I think it’s meant to be like a low tech version of those spider robots in Minority Report. Remember?
In retrospect, I guess it’s obvious that a rubber arrowhead wouldn’t hew through a raw potato.
So here is the solution.
Turn off the water to the toilet.
?
. My wife and I did this by siphoning water from the chamber in the?
back (which we learned from brewing beer) and eventually just pouring the rest of the water out down
the sewage pipe..
Remove the toilet screws. These are probably called something else. Toilet bolts?? Let’s just call them?
toilet screws.
Turn the toilet over onto its side.
See if you can see the potato through the other side--i.e., the bottom of the toilet (it seems very meta to think that a toilet has an anus, but, well, it does).?
Note, if the potato is not in your toilet, but is actually in your sewage pipe, you probably need to call a plumber.
Try to use the snake or a coat hanger to take the potato out if you can see it from the bottom. I had dreams of using a corkscrew somehow. ? “Could I get my 6 year-old to stick his hand in there with a corkscrew? Should I make him?”
If this doesn’t work, take your toilet outside.
Turn your toilet upside down.
Place a garden hose as far as you can into the back of the toilet. Kind of like an enema. Note: You may need to angle the toilet so the potato can fall out more easily.
Blast water through the toilet, backwards. No surrender.
You did it! If you look carefully you can see the potato.
I literally shouted, ‘The potato is out!’ three times. Victory was mine! Just a truly amazing feeling.?
The question I have for you now is this:? how can we recreate a struggle like this every day when we get to creatively problem-solve? And what should the consequences be for my son?
