Throwing money down the toilet

Breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said, "Why in the hell can't someone invent a toilet that works?"

Our house has four toilets. At any given moment, one of them is broken.

Right now, the toilet in our downstairs bathroom is on the fritz. Water is running into the bowl from the tank. Not gushing. Trickling. Tinkle tinkle tinkle tinkle tinkle. Drives me nuts.

This particular toilet, naturally, isn't a standard toilet. None of them are. All our toilets are as different from one another as Angelina's and Brad's kids. I removed the lid and on the left side is something that looks like a plastic bottle of anti-freeze. Its purpose? Haven't a clue.

After watching five You Tube videos on DIY toilet repair -- none of which featured toilet innards vaguely resembling this one -- I decided the problem had to be the rubber flap that is supposed to fall over the hole in the base of the tank that allows water to flow into the bowl. So I shut off the water, removed the flap, and went to the hardware store to find one just like it. I couldn't, of course, but one of the dozen or so flaps in stock looked like it would work.

But it didn't. Nor did the one I went back to buy an hour later. Or the one I bought the next day when I drove 10 miles to Home Depot. The flap may not even be the cause of the problem, but I'm not about to try to replace the entire mechanism because, whenever I have attempted that, I wind up with leftover parts and the damn toilet continues running.

In my heart I know the flap I'm looking for doesn't exist. The old one was a one-of-a-kind. Every toilet and every toilet part Kohler and/or American Standard makes is a one-of-a-kind. They do this because they secretly own a stake in every mom and pop plumbing company in the U.S., and the revenue they earn from toilet service calls more than offsets the cost of individually molding parts.

So, tomorrow, I'll call a plumber who will spend exactly 51 seconds installing a flimsy plastic part and charge me $150, handing over the bill with a snicker as he announces, "My 7-year-old could have fixed that."

Later that afternoon, just after he leaves, the part he replaced will emit an invisible beam that will destroy a one-of-a-kind part in one of our other toilets, which will start running.

Never fails.