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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   1564 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 1, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Someone crammed their lunch into the toilet, which caused it to back up and spew raw sewage all over the bathroom floor.

How does this even work? Is American plumbing significantly different?

Over here the tighest spot is the S-shaped curve at the bottom of the toilet itself, so that anything that gets past it cannot cause further blocks. Thus at worst you get (mostly) clean water spilling on the floor if you insist on flushing a blocked toilet multiple times.

In home or small business settings, or modern construction, that's the typical failure mode, and it's possible that the reporting is just conflating things. That said, in older construction of large buildings, it is very common to have choke points well in grey or blackwater pipes well after the restroom itself, either because of pipe narrowing around fittings, because of bad slope, or because of partial obstruction (roots, partially collapsed piping). When clogged at those points, you'll get wastewater from all of the points above it backfeeding over time.

This still isn't technically sewage, since it hasn't made it to the sewer, but it's still going to end up being quite a large number of toilets backing up at once.

I'm completely unsure, but the comment I saw said there was "raw sewage" everywhere as a result of the aforementioned lunch-smushing.

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