Who Ya Gonna Call?

This column originally appeared on Sunday, March 29, 2009

This column comes with a warning.

I generally respect my readers and try not to demean or offend them, so I’m letting you all know right off the bat that I will be writing about toilets this week.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that all of a sudden, when you were least expecting it, here is the Daily Local News turning into the Howard Stern Show. Here’s the finest example of journalism printed within spitting distance of the Downingtown Interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike all of a sudden joining the potty humor crowd. Here’s the Voice of Chester County letting go with a good long belch.

That’s why I warned you; I didn’t want it to come as a shock. If you’re offended, you can feel free to skip the rest of this column and go straight to the box score of the Villanova-Pitt game. (Repeat after me: “Even if every man woman and child held hands together and prayed for us to win, it just wouldn't matter, because all the really good looking girls would still go out with the guys from Penn because they've got all the money! It just doesn't matter if we win or we lose! IT JUST DOESN'T MATTER!” Thank you, Bill Murray.)

But for those of you sticking around, what I’m about to tell you is not meant to offend or insult or demean. It is meant to inform.

There’s some “ghost flushing” going on at the Chester County Justice Center.

I know what you’re thinking. You Are thinking that you haven’t heard a good ghost-flushing story since October of 2007, when the news about the library in Kent, England, hit the wires. You remember, the one about the librarian at the Gravesend Library, ex-Royal Marine Gordon Jenns, who asked the local council to pay for an exorcist to solve the mystery of his haunted water closet. Jenns, it was reported at the time, “believes that the loo is inhabited by a ghost, who flushes the toilet after everyone has gone home.”

"I'm absolutely certain the toilet flushed itself,” Jenns told his local newspaper reporter, who I assure you could not wait to get back to the newsroom as soon as he could and tell his editor about his scoop. “The door was locked and the cistern was still filling up when I went in. It even happens when the loo door’s locked,” he added, calling the matter, “off-putting.”

Be that as it may, when you go to the men’s loo on the Fifth Floor of the JC, there will come a time when the toilets around you start flushing away, every few seconds, even though you are the only person in the room. The toilets have those modern motion sensor gizmos that are supposed to react only when you leave so you don’t have to go through the trouble of pulling the handle. But instead they go off with the slightest provocation, or with no provocation at all. So there you are, all alone with your thoughts and the latest Daily Local, and all you hear is a symphony of rushing flushes, timed perfectly, one after another, whooshing away nothing but pure, clean water. It’s off-putting, you might say.

Not wishing to raise the specter, so to speak, of having an exorcism performed for the ghost flushing at taxpayer expense, I made discreet inquiries about the matter. Seems like I was not the first to knock on that door.

County Director of Facilities Extraordinaire Steve Fromnick told me that he has had his people working on the problem for some time now. One of his assistants wrote to say that: “Originally, we had to go through and calibrate the flushometers to zero them in. We believe now we’re getting ghost flushing because of cleaning agents being used on the sensors. How much of this ghost flushing is happening we’re not sure, but we are in contact with our custodian contractor to educate them on the correct maintenance procedures.”

I’ll bet the folks in the White House Press Corps would give their Blackberries to be able to use the word “flushometers” in a sentence.

I don’t know if I actually want the problem solved because it is, after all, somewhat relaxing to hear the sound of whooshing water going on around you when you’re otherwise occupied. I accept the fact that ghost flushing is most likely wasteful and environmentally unsound. Still, I remember those days when I thought that pure joy revolved around nothing more than flushing the toilet over and over again.

But we all graduate college at some point. Even ‘Nova students.