Monday, March 21, 2005

Quassy Bolts Toilet Tank Lids Down

At amusement parks around the country, employees are arriving to begin the process of refurbishing and freshening up parks in preparation for the hordes of guests that will begin arriving in a few short weeks. Flowers are being planted, walkways repaired, fresh coats of paint applied, dirty areas hosed down. But the workers at Connecticut's little Quassy Amusement Park have an extra task to attend to: bolting down the upper tank lids in the restrooms.

The reason for this unusual step? It's to avoid a repeat of a terrifying series of upper decking incidents that befell the small park at the end of last season.

"It was horrible," says Quassy employee Michael Hirsch. "One day in late August I smelled this horrible smell coming from the bathroom. It reeked like a slaughterhouse, man. So I went in to check it out. Guess what? Some jerkoffs had upper decked every sit-down toilet in both the women's and men's rooms!"

"Bunch of savages in this town," he added, frustrated.

Also known as "upper-tanking," "top loading," or "going top shelf," upper decking is a nefarious practice where a person defecates into the top water tank of a toilet, turning the clean water supply of the toilet into what one expert labels "an endless river of shit."

The upper deckers returned to Quassy at least six more times during the remainder of the season. According to employees, each incident caused them to waste up to seventeen hours cleaning the restrooms, though the unholy stench itself generally hovered over the entire town of Middlebury for up to an additional six days following each decking occurrence. For that reason, the park invested substantial funds this season in giant padlocks and chains for each toilet. The chains will be bolted to massive steel pipes drilled two hundred feet into the bedrock to better thwart young hooligans from breaking their way into the water tanks.

"We had a bunch of money we were going to use to build a 300-foot tall launched B&M with twelve inversions," said one distressed park employee who asked not to be named. "But every cent of it had to go into this new upper deck deterrent system. Let that be a lesson to anyone else out there who feels like plopping one upstairs...we all suffer when we upper deck."

--JCK