An ode to my new favourite person in the world

I moved into a co-op complex at the start of September, which is essentially my first time living in an apartment with roommates. There are positives and negatives to this. Positive: I now have a kitchen that I share with two people as opposed to ten! Negative: one of my roommates introduced herself to me by describing her room as "r*tarded." (Me: *rictus grin*) Another negative: I woke up this morning to find my roommates already gone and a note on the toilet that said "don't flush, broken."

Now, there is one (1) toilet in our apartment. There are three people living here. Obviously, this is not a livable state of affairs. So I took a plunger to the toilet, because I am a mature responsible adult who does mature responsible adult things like cleaning out the toilet. Unfortunately, my toilet plunger skills are underdeveloped, so my attempts weren't cutting it. Time to call in the big guns.

*Handel's Messiah plays*

I have never actually seen a toilet repairman before. The toilets at my parents' house have a remarkable track record of not breaking (though they did once have to call a plumber after I clogged the sink by cutting my Barbies' hair over it) so I didn't actually have a definitive idea of what toilet repairmen actually DID. As it turned out, the guy who showed up to fix my toilet- I didn't get his name, so we'll just call him Awesome- brought both a plunger of his own and some kind of high-tech toilet de-clogger called a "snake." When his plunger proved as ineffective as mine had been, he inserted the snake into the toilet bowl and twisted it until the toilet was successfully unclogged. I won't burden you with the gory details, but suffice to say, I'm pretty sure someone in my apartment has been eating at Taco Bell. (Sorry, Taco Bell.)

I feel like the most important lesson of this experience is that toilet repairmen are gods among men. No, I'm serious: how long would you last without a functioning toilet? You wouldn't, would you? No, you would camp out at whatever local business had public washrooms until someone came along and made your bathroom usable again. If the world did not have toilet repairmen, WE WOULD ALL DIE. Do we really need ad executives? Do we need members of Parliament? (Apparently not, if you live in the States.) The answer, my friends, is that we do not truly need either of those things. What we need is more toilet repairmen. I'd start training to be one myself, if I weren't destined to be an unemployed arts graduate.