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By Bob Niles

You know what I like about cleaning the toilets? NOTHING!

NOTHING AT ALL! But this now seems to be my weekly choir now that I’ve retired.

Now this may surprise many of you as you didn’t think I could hold down a job to retire from. Or, what bum would ever hire him? Or the most popular — I didn’t know he ever worked!?

Well the joke’s on you. Well, actually on me. I'm working now.

Yes, thanks for asking. I am married and my wife still works. She gets up early five days a week and drives into Vancouver from Delta, which most days is about an hour commute. She listens to liars all day at the bank trying to borrow money and then drives home. Round trip is about 10 hours, and I swear she goes through this just so she doesn’t have to do chores around the house.

Ole Bob’s home 10 hours a day by himself. He’s got nothing to do. I bet he’d like to clean toilets every week. This is what she must be thinking. How she ever got that idea I have no clue.

Now if we had just one toilet, maybe. But no, we buy this place with four toilets. No showers, sinks or bathtubs, just toilets. This place must have been built by the guy who owns the ‘Porta Potty’ company. Just toilets.

The wife tells me differently, that we do have basins and sinks and tubs and blah, blah, blah. But I reject her reality and submit my own. Just toilets. If I admit to the others, I’ll have to clean them!

Things were great when the kids lived with us. (Gee, I miss them) They would clean two-thirds of the bathrooms in our old place, and I would only have to do a third. Plus they did such a poor job that it made my lackluster effort look like I put a lot into it. She was forever on their case about how to clean a bathroom so by the time she got to me she was just too tired to really care.

Then a terrible thing happened. They moved out. Now who’s going to clean the bathrooms they once cleaned? They are, I reasoned. Knowing their marks in school and the type of job qualifications they possessed, I figured they soon would be living back home — so I let their bathrooms wait for them to come home. That reasoning didn’t last very long.

I suggested we get out of this old drafty house and get a smaller place to clean — l mean live.

This made the lady I married 34 years ago very happy. Probably the happiest I’ve ever seen her. The wife (and I was apparently there) bought a townhouse — with four toilets! (Remember that my reality doesn’t recognize other things in the bathroom.) Yes, we (meaning me) now have an extra toilet to clean. How I missed that I have no idea.

I have also found out that living in a new place requires a greater level of cleanliness. I mean I was crappy at the old place, so how can I be better here? Apparently I can. I must, she says. (I think "says" is too soft of a word here).

Now I’ve installed hundreds of toilets in my years of plumbing so it wouldn’t be hard for a guy like me to place all four toilets in a row all on one floor. Much easier and quicker to clean with that giant basting brush (That’s another story. Let’s just say that B-B-Que did not go well.) when they’re all side by side on one floor. But no, they’re on three different floors separated by 30 stairs.

If you leave the basting brush on the bottom floor and head to the master (now here I could use primary suite but the wife has that room claimed for herself and prefers that it be referred to as master) suite, it’s a long trek. 

I start on one toilet, then forget something. I go and retrieve it, forget what I’m doing and 20 minutes later I’m walking around the house using the basting brush as a backscratcher and wondering why I’m wearing rubber gloves.

This memory lapse is due in part to the toxic chemicals I combine to clean toilets one through four with. I got this cocktail of chemicals so finely tuned that the pinkish-white cloud goes no higher than the toilet tank now. And boy can it catch fish! One quarter cup of my Drano-Comet-Chlorine-Channel No. 5-Mr. Clean-Spray Cheese in a Can toilet cocktail in any lake will bring up enough fish for any cookout ( Don’t mix these chemicals at home, kids! I mean it! Go to a friend’s house.).

And so it is my plight, me and the four toilets. Each has its own name, which I won’t divulge for the sake of politeness.

— Bob Niles 

A retired plumber from the Vancouver area, Bob Niles is a stay-at-home grandpa. (The grandkids are in school, and he’s at home.) His wife says his most annoying feature is that “he doesn’t ask for directions — and a thousand other things — and leaves the seat up.”