This week I bought a new toilet. The order page said it would be delivered upstairs, but the courier left it downstairs in the building and expected me to carry it up myself. He even showed me the shipping note, which said no upstairs delivery. I had no real way around it, so I hauled it up on my own. Afterward I complained to customer service, and they told me I should have contacted them on the spot so they could deal with it. Maybe I’m too easygoing. Since I only live on the second floor, I was angry, but I still let it slide.
I hadn’t purchased installation when I placed the order because I figured I could find someone cheaper through a local service app. That turned out to be a bad calculation. The quote I got was 150, which was actually 30 more than adding the installation service during checkout. And that price included removing the old toilet and installing the new one; if it had just been installation, it would have been 70. So I immediately gave up on the outside option, went back to customer service, and added the official service instead.
The installer came yesterday and finished the job, but told me not to use the toilet for at least two days so the adhesive could dry. If it leaked, I was supposed to contact him again. The drain outlet on the toilet has two holes to fit different rough-in distances, so the unused one has to be sealed off. That’s the part worth complaining about: when I placed the order, I had clearly been asked to choose the rough-in distance, but what arrived was still the two-hole version instead of a single-hole model matched to what I selected. So that whole selection step felt meaningless.
The installer said that if it had been a single-hole toilet, I could have used it right away. With the two-hole kind, you have to wait for the glue to dry, and even then leaks are more likely. He sounded pretty annoyed by them too, saying they often have to come back and redo the work. Apparently there are even worse ones with three holes.
Once the toilet was out of commission, my original plan was simple: use a nearby public restroom for the moment, then go stay at my parents’ place for a couple of days. But that same night it started pouring rain. Eventually I had to pee, so, well, I improvised with a cola bottle.
Today I overslept after staying up late watching shows and didn’t wake up until 11, so the trip to my parents’ place got pushed to tomorrow. That meant another trip to the public restroom.
It actually brought back memories. Back in middle school and high school, when my family was renting a one-story house, there was no bathroom at home and we always had to use a public toilet. Each trip took six or seven minutes on foot. If it was just peeing, fine. If you had diarrhea, that was another story entirely. That was when your sphincter really got tested.
Today’s public toilet turned out to be a squat toilet. The moment I crouched down, I realized how completely I’ve gotten used to sitting toilets. I felt unsteady in the squat, and my stomach pressing against my thighs was genuinely uncomfortable. By the time I finished, my legs and feet had gone numb.
This public restroom only opened fairly recently. Before that, the spot seemed to be used as a sanitation office rather than a restroom, though people apparently kept mistaking it for one. Later it was demolished and rebuilt into an actual public toilet, while the original public toilet nearby was torn down and replaced with sanitation office space instead. Kind of funny.
When this new restroom was being built, it happened to be around the same time that the red-brick house controversy from Dream Home was all over the place, and the exterior style did look a little similar. That said, the “red brick” on this public restroom isn’t really red brick.
What happened next
After about three days, I came back and checked the toilet. It seemed fine. Then the very next day, I found that it was leaking.
So I contacted the installer again. He took it apart and found that the adhesive hadn’t fully dried the first time, which was what caused the leak. He redid the sealing, and after applying the glue again, he even used a hair dryer on it for a while. Still, he told me to wait another three or four days. If it leaked again after that, I’d need to talk to customer service and maybe switch to a different kind of adhesive.
So this afternoon I went and bought a bottle of Mizone, because using a cola bottle is not always ideal when the pressure is hard to judge. Hopefully in another three or four days, the toilet will finally stop leaking.