A while back I wrote a piece called "The Turd Man of Alcatraz" that described my familial role as the discoverer of all floaters and clogged toilets in our house.  Now I’ve taken my act on the road. 

On Monday and Tuesday I was in DC on business and I stayed at the Hampton Inn in Old Town Alexandria. This being the week after Easter I think I was the only businessperson in the hotel and I was surrounded by tourist families. So I’m getting ready to leave (I’d already checked out earlier) and I decided to hit the lobby bathroom before I left.  There was a man waiting outside the men’s room and it ended up he was waiting for his 8-ish year old son to come out.  After they left I went in the bathroom and found, you guessed it, an amazingly large floater.  I was concerned that the kid actually had clogged the toilet but it ended up he just forgot to flush.

Oh well, it is nice to know why you were put on this earth, you know?

In (somewhat) related news Cottonelle has manufactured a roll of toilet paper that tells kids where they need to tear the sheets so they don’t create a clog-monster.  There is some debate as to its efficacy as it doesn’t seem to take into account the different methods employed by users: folding, wrapping or wadding.  My kids naturally lean to the method of wadding a half-roll for each dab-that’ll-do-you, but I’ve implemented a folding training program that seems to have reduced our occurences of brown floods.  Now if I could only figure out how to put an alarm on the toilet that senses a non-flush and automatically zaps them with a not-so-pleasant electric shock as they attempt to leave the bathroom.  The same alarm should also knock them on their butts when they forget to wash their hands.

Here’s my health tip for the day: never accept any food handled by a female under the age of 11 (they discover cleanliness around 12 and then become compulsive) or a male under the age of 26, which is when the average man gets married and also learns how to wash his hands after being harangued 24/7 by his lovely young bride who he’s just discovered is a freakishly compulsive hypochondriac.