It's a load bearing bottle

January 31, 2008 12:04 AM

For those of you who don't know, I rent a house with four other roommates. So I end up sharing one bathroom with Jen and John.

I needed to fill up the soap dispenser today, so I went looking for the big hand-soap refill bottle. I found it wedged inside the old cabinet over the toilet. The cabinet with the shaky, bending shelves packed with bottles and tubes and boxes of toiletries. (As a non-metrosexual male, I should point out that only a very tiny bit of it was actually mine.)

That the bottle was wedged between the bottom of the cabinet and an unstable shelf should have been a warning. I ignored it, caring only that the soap would be refilled, thus allowing me to cleanse and sanitize my hands for weeks to come. So I filled up the soap dispenser and went to return the bottle to the cabinet.

My mistake was evident as soon as I opened the door. With its support removed, the shelf was tilted at a forty-five degree angle. Its contents began raining down upon the floor and, worse, into the toilet.

Upon further consideration, perhaps the floor, rather than the toilet, was the worst part. There were several glass items on the shelf, and they instantly shattered as they hit the floor. This slow and inevitable rain continued for quite some time. The noise was quite loud but it was some time afterwards that I heard someone ask, "Dylan, is everything OK in there?"

"Jen," I answered, "open the door and come in here."

Jen opened the door to find me propping up the shelf with the top of the soap bottle. The angle and weight of the shelf prevented me from wedging it in there as before, yet if I let off of it, there would be more falling and breaking. She stood for a moment, staring at the situation.

I should point out the words "stood" and "staring," for they do not indicate action. Meanwhile, I was stuck, unable to fix the situation but unwilling to let the rest of the shelf's contents fall by releasing the bottle. After some time, I nodded to the shelf and added, "Can you lift this up for me?"

She finally did. I was finally relieved, and the cleanup began. We removed the shelf so that it would never again be a problem, and Jen proceeded to clean out all of the things she did not need. As with anything that hasn't been cleaned out for a while, most of it was tossed out. I eventually got the glass cleaned and vacuumed up.

The moral of this story is don't support unstable shelves with load-bearing bottles.