Flush

We drive to the Home Depot in Brandon. We’re shopping for commodes.

Like Sam’s Club, Home Depot is a working warehouse. Racks — like mammoth bookcases made of orange steel — line the aisles. Retail merchandise is displayed at eye level. Stock, often still in the shipping crate, perches on the highest shelves.

On the toilet aisle, the opposite is true. At our feet lie cardboard boxes packed with seats and tanks. The display potties, however, loom just above our heads, affixed to a wedge-shaped shelf that slopes toward us for easier viewing. (Why? Would desperate shoppers be tempted to take floor-level potties for a test drive?) As a result, we shop with our heads craned back against our shoulder blades, wondering about the likelihood of a porcelain avalanche.

In the process, we discover commodes come in different models, with different flushing capacity, different seat heights, different tank styles, and different names, including The Cadet, The Patriot, and The Heritage. (What’s up with the military motif? Is everyone who works for American Standard an ex-Marine?

Ultimately, we go with The Champion, a model capable, in theory, of downing twenty-one golf balls (or thirty-one synthetic sponges, or sixteen linen napkins, or forty-one rubber tubes — see video) with a single flush.

We cart our gleaming new throne to the check-out, where we remind the clerk that, according to the hand-lettered sign above the potty display, the purchase of a Champion toilet qualifies us for a $25.00 Home Depot gift card.

He screws up his face and shrugs. “Never heard about that.” He fires his laser gun at the Champion’s barcode. He glances at the register screen. He tell us our total.

“The offer was on a sign back in the plumbing department,” we say.

He frowns. “Maybe that offer expired.”

“Could you check?”

“It’s probably one of those mail-in rebate kind of offers,” he says. “There’s a board covered with those mail-in rebates around here somewhere. We’re remodeling, though, so I got no idea where it is.”

I glance at the phone above his register. “Maybe you could call someone who knows?”

The clerk lifts the phone and calls for a manager. We stand aside. The three customers behind us check out. A manager never comes.

The clerk lifts the phone again. “Last time I saw that board, it was over by Patio and Greenhouse. You might check there.”

I walk back to Patio and Greenhouse. Overhead, I hear the clerk’s voice on the PA system, calling for Charlie. In the meantime, I find seed packets, fertilizer, bags of topsoil, and snowblowers (!), but no mail-in rebate forms.

Charlie, who must be hanging out with the managers, never materializes, either.

We continue hanging out up front. Finally, the clerk closes his register and walks back to plumbing, where he has a conversation with the Home Depotians assigned to that area of the store. He returns with bad news: “No one in plumbing knows anything about that offer, either. Let me try to get aholt of Charllie again.”

We have invested fifteen minutes waiting for various saviors, and we are on the verge of being late for today’s screening of Sideways. When the clerk turns to make the call, we sneak out.

Later, Clyde pulls the mail-in rebate form from the American Standard website. It takes him less than twenty seconds.