What Makes Us Hopping Mad

I was furious. But I think you would have been too.

It was early June, two years ago, and we had just gotten back from a family vacation. Every summer we make a trip to Birchwood, Wisconsin with Lisa’s parents, Margaret and Conrad. We share a cabin at the Fred Thomas Resort. We boat, fish, read, play with our kids, grill, and rescue Conrad from whatever trouble he happens to get himself into (but that’s a story for a different day).

In general, we just relax for a week and recharge for the next set of life’s little challenges.

Well, that year, when we got back, life was ready. The hot water heater was broken. So, I fixed it. It was a pain, but I’d fixed it before so at least I knew what I needed and what to do when I got back from the hardware store.

Next, a couple of days later, I thought I heard water dripping. The confusing thing was that the water was dripping from a first floor ceiling in the center of our house. That meant that the water could only be coming from a room upstairs—the bathroom.

It was (oh horror of horrors) the toilet.

We had a leaky toilet, and we had it bad. I had to tear out huge chunks of soaking, moldy, plaster and lathe from that ceiling. It was gross. Lord knows how long it had been leaking before it got bad enough to drip through and be noticed.
Now you might think this is the part of the story that made me furious.

Not so.

Yes, it bummed me. Unlike the hot water repair, I’d never replaced a toilet before, and you just never know what you’re going to find when you start a job in one of these old Wisconsin farmhouses. As for the damage to the ceiling—that room had been slated for remodeling anyway (eventually). The only one to ever see the damaged ceiling is Risk, our dog. So even tearing up the ceiling didn’t bother me much. It was a messy job, but I’ve had worse (that’s another story too).
And to tell you the truth, we had actually been wanting a new toilet anyway—one of those 1.6 gallon power flushers to save on water and our septic system.

So why was I furious?

The toilet that we bought wouldn’t work. We drove to the Forest Lake Menards and back (about 50 miles round trip), spent a healthy amount of cash for a quality toilet, and it didn’t work. The tank wouldn’t automatically refill after you flushed it. You had to jiggle things.

Who wants to spend good money on a toilet and have to jiggle . . .toilet parts?

So I returned it the next day—no problem. But the replacement worked even worse! This one wouldn’t stop running.
Now I started to get angry. I couldn’t believe it. So I called the plumbing department at Menards. Maybe I didn’t use my most friendly phone voice, but the guy on the other end actually said, “I’ve never had any problems with this toilet before.” Emphasis on the “I’ve.”

The product I paid for was defective, and now I was getting crappy customer service.

Remember the Looney-Tunes cartoons with the whistle and steam out the ears? It was like that.
The bottom line is we eventually were reimbursed for our time and trouble—and we finally got a toilet that works.

So—why did I tell you that story?

Like you, we think that when you pay good money for something—it had darn well better work.

Shaklee just plain works. We wouldn’t do this if it didn’t.