According to Roto Rooter, the day after Thanksgiving is the single busiest of the year for residential plumbers, mainly because big holiday meal preparation and cleanup leads to lots of unwanted waste in the kitchen drain, garbage disposal and toilets.
"People think the garbage disposal or the toilet are trash cans," said John Elward, the operating manager for a Roto Rooter in Fort Wayne, Ind. "They think nothing of putting egg shells down the disposal. They might as well just throw sand down there."
Roto-Rooter
It seems every Roto Rooter employee has found a bizarre item on Thanksgiving. One customer dropped his dentures down the drain, causing the drain to stop up a few weeks later.
"I pulled a ham bone out of a toilet one Thanksgiving," Elward said incredulously. "The woman who called was in the habit of flushing things down the toilet instead of the garbage disposal and decided to do the ham bone."
But that's not the only bizarre food item that has caused a drain -- and, consequently, a Thanksgiving feast -- to stop dead in its tracks.
Chuck Kruse, a Roto Rooter employee in Tampa, Fla., once answered a call on Thanksgiving to unclog a sewer that he thought he had fixed the night before.
Greeted with curses from the family patriarch, an Armenian grandfather, Kruse went to work and eventually managed to extract an entire rabbit's head by the ears.
Apparently, the family chose to have rabbit rather than turkey and Kruse clucked with joy when he explained the problem to the man who had just cursed him out shortly before.
"Naturally, I was only too happy to inform the cursing grandfather that not only was one of the family's food preparation specialists the responsible party, but they also owed me an additional $150," he said. "I must admit, I did get a kick out of presenting (wrapped in a plastic bag) the toilet paper and poo-covered rabbit head to the family, which had gathered around the bathroom door to witness the work."
Not everybody shoves a rabbit down their commode, but Elward says toys are often a source of a clog.
"People will let the kids play by themselves and one of them will flush down the toys," he said. "I found a Barbie head once."
It seems every Roto Rooter person has found a bizarre item on Thanksgiving. A partial list of the more unusual clog causers includes a hockey stick, ball bearings, bungee cords, pine cones, a tear gas projectile, bullets and a live cannon shell dating back to the Civil War.
However, Elward's most memorable case was the set of dentures one of his employees found.
"The guy who dropped them knew where he had lost them, but he just went on, figuring he could get another pair," he said. "But a few weeks later, his drain was just stopped cold and when we unclogged it, there they were."
Elward doesn't want to speculate on whether the guy cleaned them off and put them back in the mouth.
But he does say there are some things that people should do to reduce the chances of needing him:
- Never pour fats or cooking oils down drains. They solidify in pipes. Instead, wipe grease from pots with paper towels and throw in trash.
- Avoid putting stringy, fibrous or starchy waste in the garbage disposal. Poultry skins, celery, fruit and potato peels, for example, cannot be sufficiently broken down.
- Make sure the disposal is running when you put food into it. Don't wait until it's full to turn it on.
- For homes hosting weekend guests, it's a good idea to wait 10 minutes between showers so slow drains have time to do their job.
- Never flush cotton balls, swabs, hair or facial scrub pads down a toilet. They don't dissolve and will cause clogs.
- Try to address any plumbing problems before the holiday and before guests arrive. However, in holiday emergencies, don't hesitate to ask up front about extra holiday service fees.
- As always, know your limits. Often, minor plumbing problems turn into plumbing catastrophes if not handled properly.
"There are lots of people who will do things to someone else's sink or toilet that they'd never do to their own," he said.