Peter McKay

When we sell our house, I will tell the realtor to advertise the house as having six bedrooms and two and a quarter baths. That's because a full bath is one with a bathtub, a sink, and a completely working toilet. A half bath is one with a sink and a completely working toilet. A quarter bath is what we have off our kitchen.

The first two bathrooms came with the house when it was built in 1917. The powder room off our kitchen came a couple years later and is attached the sewer line via 35 feet of horizontal sewer pipe. The pipe has developed cracks over the years and is prone to tree root infiltration. Almost twenty years ago, when we moved in, we had a series of backups — three in one year — where sewage flooded with basement, destroying priceless (OK, sort of junky) personal items. We called a sewer man, and he snaked out the roots. He told me before he left that the "less" we used that bathroom, the better. As a result, I made an ironclad family rule: The powder room was for brushing ones teeth and, only if absolutely, positively, necessary, "number ones." Anything ... shall we say ... more substantial, had to be done in one of our actual bathrooms.

My kids used to call me the poop police. For years, I used to rush to the door any time someone would go into the powder room for more than a few seconds, bang on the door and demand to know what was "going on in there." It was kind of stressful and occasionally led to someone screaming that I was a bad parent, who would have kids who grew up with serious complexes. But thanks to my dedication and watchfulness, we haven't experienced a backup in almost twenty years.

To be fair, the kids grew up knowing how bad it could be when the basement sewage backed up. The worst one flooded our Christmas decorations, including our knitted Santa stockings, and while we washed them in almost boiling water, they remained discolored. (Santa's bread is no longer white, and every Christmas Eve the kids would hang up their stockings with one hand while holding their noses with the other.)

But as time goes by, people forget, and security has admittedly gotten lax.

I have suspected for some years now that the powder room has been used for "unauthorized" activities. I would go into more detail as to the particular culprit I have in mind, but if I do, I have been threatened with certain death.

All of this came to a head last Friday when my daughters had a boy come over for what he just thought was an evening of pizza and on-demand movies. My wife and I were sitting in the kitchen watching TV, when this unsuspecting teenage boy walked into the powder room and closed the door. Thirty seconds later (I still count — he had another 20 seconds before I started banging on the door) he came scurrying out the door, looking like he'd seen a ghost. He was closely followed by a wave of toilet water, looking like a teenage Noah running from a flood. I jumped up from my chair, swore like a drunken but articulate sailor, and scrambled to find the plunger.

The plumber's helper was, to put it mildly, not all that much help. Every time I pressed down on the plunger in the toilet, water came squirting out the sink, squooshing out of the floorboards and spritzing out of the drain pipe joints.

The next day, I called Chuck, our plumber, and he spent half a day, on a holiday weekend, crouched over our basement drains with a loud snake machine, pausing every few minutes to proudly display the piles of tree roots he was fishing out of the lines. Chuck agreed that my "limited use" policy was a good one, and should be enforced more vigorously. (He also told me he doesn't do drains any more, so don't call again.)

The next day, I gathered everyone together (including the culprit, who should be reading this column and feeling really, really guilty) and explained in no uncertain terms, from now on any time one of them was inside the powder room, I'd be standing outside the powder room, stop watch in hand, to make sure that nothing too "substantial" was occurring inside.

And any teenaged boys who come over for a visit to the McKay house, be warned: After years of permissiveness, the poop policeman is back on duty.

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