Oakes Earns His Spurs

Tools: Manliness

After years of sterling service, our beloved toilet seat passed away peacefully in her sleep this week, having developed a terminal crack in her left side after feeling the full force of a particularly heavy dinner guest.

On most occasions, any sort of house related maintenance job would see us calling a variety of tradesmen and professionals, be it plumbers, painters, or even someone to change a car tyre. Although I strike an intimidating pose, I am surprisingly useless when it comes to any sort of DIY job around the home, and it is usually The Girlfriend who will change the light bulbs, whilst I stand behind her, watching and nodding approvingly.

2010 is a year of action however, and so Saturday morning – rather than sleeping off the whiskey of the previous night – saw me lying on my back in the bathroom instead, with an assortment of impressive looking tools at my side. There I lay for a good half hour or so, staring intently at the nether regions of our toilet, as an impending feeling of desperation slowly engulfed me.

Contrary to popular belief, changing a toilet seat is a mammoth and intricate task, eclipsed only perhaps by performing brain surgery, or designing an interplanetary space shuttle. Created in the early 19th century by engineers who had grown weary of urinating in the streets, they built a contraption that is pretty much indestructible – save for the seat itself – which is like the Achilles Heel of the traditional bathroom loo. Displaying a wicked sense of humour however, they went and decided to make the process of removing the seat an almost impossible task, a task attempted by many but achieved by few.

You see, the seat is attached to the porcelain base through a complicated set of long screw-like nails carefully mounted on each side of the bowl. These are fastened from both the top and the bottom of the bowl, through carefully hidden screws unseen by the naked eye.

Unfastening these with a traditional screw driver is an exercise in futility – there is simply no space to leverage yourself and turn the screw driver appropriately. It took me about two hours of sweating, swearing and just a little bit of sobbing before I came to this realisation, eventually resorted to contorting my body into a human pretzel, basically having to tuck both my left leg and right arm behind my head in order to successfully unfasten the first bastard of a screw.

Ecstatic at this moral victory, I immediately broke into a celebratory Macarena, until The Girlfriend appeared and sagely pointed out that there were still three sections to complete, I was a mediocre Macarena dancer, and she needed to use the toilet facilities shortly.

Using her threat to turn my car into a porta-loo as a motivating factor, I was able to power through and remove the old seat, and install the new one in a relatively quick turn-around time of three hours 45 minutes, or roughly the time it takes to learn the Macarena.

All in all it was a good day then; we have a new toilet seat in the family, I saved my car from a terrible fate, and I discovered that I am able to to tuck my leg behind my head.

I’d say that’s a win in any man’s book.

Oakes signing off.

Shaun Oakes

This was written by the hulking mass of manliness known as Shaun Oakes. If you enjoyed what he had to say, you owe it to yourself to follow him on Twitter at @shaunoakes. Do it now.