The Poo From Hell

I recently moved in to a new apartment I have up until this point been reasonably happy with having a new apartment. I really like having a kitchen and bathroom of my own instead of sharing them with strangers as I have been doing up until this time.

I found it endlessly annoying that I couldn't keep a roll of toilet paper in the bathroom and finish it off myself because I was at the house so much less than the other people using the bathroom and invariably someone else would use my toilet paper. At the last house I lived at I bought around 30 rolls of toilet paper to put in the bathroom. Of those rolls that I put into the bathroom I myself used the last few sheets only 2 times. Which gives a rough estimate that other people were using more than 90% of my toilet paper. Eventually I started taking rolls of toilet paper in to the bathroom from my room with me and using whatever was there if I forgot.

I must say that at my new apartment I was quite enjoying having my own bathroom (I am enjoying having my own kitchen much more but that is another rant entirely). The ability to shower whenever I want to without waiting for some one else and, better, not having to wait for someone to finish their shower when I need to go to the bathroom is very nice.

I never thought of it as an advantage that when I found a great big nasty dump sitting unflushed in the toilet I at least had people to blame for it. I had thought (silly me!) that when I had my own toilet I would never have to encounter such a situation again. But beginning about a week ago little floating turds started showing up in my toilet bowl. They are very hard to flush because they are so buoyant so at first I assumed that they belonged to my very own bowels and had simply been left behind when I flushed since they were so very floaty. I don't generally check to make sure that everything that went down when I flushed doesn't come back up a few seconds later. So I must have flushed and not noticed when these things remained behind. However something of an entirely different magnitude has been happening. When I came back from school Monday night I was immediately greeted by a horrible eye burning stench permeating my apartment. I thought that something in the garbage must be going rotten and perhaps the dishes in the sink had been allowed to sit for too long etc etc. After a quick cleaning of the kitchen and turning on the air conditioning to help diffuse the smell it became less by a little bit.

The smell was ebbing away only very slowly with this treatment and so when it cooled down somewhat outside I opened up the door to my balcony and went to turn off the air conditioning. But this time when I passed by the bathroom the stench became extremely strong and I realized suddenly that something rotten in the kitchen was not the culprit at all but instead it was something rotten in the toilet. I flicked on the light and saw a disgusting poo soup floating in the toilet bowl. The soup was complete with disgusting brown/orange colored water and several extremely buoyant logs of brown sludge. After flushing a few times I finally got it all to go away and immediately my apartment began to smell much better.

After finding such a thing waiting in my toilet for me to discover I couldn't help but wonder if someone had come into my apartment while I was away and had intentionally left this there for me to discover. I wasn't sure if I had locked the door or not and it was possible that someone had just come in and decided to help themselves to my restroom fascilities. I hoped that the problem was temporary and had been caused perhaps by a plumbing problem in an adjacent apartment.

But today when I came home from school again for the second day in a row I was greeted by a foul eye burning stench and then shortly thereafter by a floating mess in my toilet bowl. This time however the poo is even more buoyant and no matter how many times I flush the toilet some of it comes floating back to taunt me. It as if someone ate a life preserver and a whole bunch of rotting meat to make the most persistent and foul smelling poo imaginable, and then they took a nice long dump in my toilet while I was away.

Today I am certain that I locked the door when I left which fact combined with its regularity means that most likely this problem is a plumbing problem of some sort. Though I must say it also has to be related to the extraordinary buoyancy of the poo involved and perhaps someone in one of the other apartments has a secret passion for spaghetti made with foam pool noodles.