Frisky frogs frustrate Floridian

Tampa, Fla. — "We had a lady who'd call us two or three times a month about frogs in her toilet," says Paul Laezza, a supervisor with Philip Maurici Plumbing.

"She'd find them swimming in the bowl. There wasn't much we could do — we'd just catch them. The last time she called, she said she had been sitting on the toilet and one jumped through her legs.

"I decided to go on the roof and shine my flashlight down the vent stack. I could see 10 or 12 frogs clinging to the pipe with their beady eyes staring at me. I poured water down the stack, washing them out to the sewer. We haven't heard from the customer since."

No way to spend April Fool's Day

Kansas City, Mo. — "A customer called complaining of a strong odor in her basement and wanted us to see if her sewer line had broken," says Rich Mousel, owner of M & M Performance Plumbing. "All the indicators were there: soil settling where the sewer was, moisture marks on the floor, and a sewer odor inside and out.

"I got a backhoe and a crew, and we start digging out under the porch. The deeper we dug, the stronger the odor got. We found out that the odor was a dead possum under her porch. Problem solved, but I did have to charge about $2,900 for the backhoe and the crew.

"All this happened on April Fool's Day. I'm scheduling that date off for the next 20 years."

Contractor's duty creates conflict

Cincinnati — "We were replacing a toilet at a customer's home," says Michelle Pepin, office manager for Tarvin Plumbing Co. Inc.

"We removed the old toilet and set it next to the newly installed one. One of our new contractors arrived on the job after us and had to use the bathroom. I can't say this tastefully — he did his 'daily constitution' in the old toilet, so there was no way to flush it! I'm not sure who had to clean up the mess."

Hero plumber answers the call for animals great and small

Ed Ernest, owner of Proformance Plumbing in Charlotte, N.C., recounts a story about a squirrel in a toilet.

I was in my truck one day and I get a call … "Ed, Ed — you've gotta come out right now. I got a problem — I have a squirrel in my toilet."

I ask her, "Is it in the toilet or the tank?" And she says, "The squirrel is in my bowl. His tail is sticking out of the water."

I rush out to get there, she takes me to the upstairs bathroom, and there in the bowl: a squirrel's tail sticking out of the water. Somehow he had gotten down there and turned around, it's head was on the curve of the toilet [S-curve that prevents gas backflow], out of the water, and the rest of him was in the bowl.

I try to grab him by the tail and pull him out. That did not work. A little bit of his tail came off in my hand. If I try and push him through and he gets stuck, he'll be in their septic lines and they'll really have a problem.

So I pull out the toilet completely and I look in there [at the bottom of the now-removed toilet], and I can see a little bit of his head.

What can I use? I usually clear clogged toilets out with an auger — I'll use that. It will punch him in the butt a little bit, and he'll come out the other end.

I push with the auger, I push it up in there and it nudges him a little bit further. But it only went so far before I had to get him around the bend. So I had to turn it a little bit, and I push a little bit, and I hear a little scratching and I see the head come a little closer to the end. I got him a little closer.

Finally, I get him out to the point where his head and his front paws are sticking out. I grabbed him by the paws, and pull him out just like I was birthing this thing.

The squirrel is in shock [i.e. docile, not moving] Have you ever seen a wet squirrel? They look just like a rat. I take him outside and stick him on a tree.

That was the good part of it.

The bad part is that whenever I went back in there to pull my auger out of the toilet, there was another one on the end of my auger that I didn't know about. We were able to save one and the other one didn't make it.

I did have to charge her. Where she was at was a 75-mile round trip from my shop.