Posted on 07/30/2019 3:58:23 PM PDT by Rummyfan
I’m going to be scarce today. Old friends from Dallas are visiting. They are immigrants from Ukraine. I’m going to be showing them around St. Francisville. Last night, after jambalaya, we were all drinking a bit and telling stories. Vladimir told a great one about how his father, during Soviet times, solved the family’s toilet problem.
When the family’s toilet bowl cracked, you couldn’t just go to the hardware store and buy a replacement. What hardware store? The government installed that toilet, and it was the government’s responsibility to replace it. But good luck getting on a list to have your toilet replaced. Finally, Vladimir’s father, a senior engineer, cooked up a plan. He had a Communist Party connection in a city called Novokuznetzk, a guy who could get him a new toilet.
Problem: Vladimir’s family lived in Dnipro, Ukraine; Novokuznetzk is on the other side of the USSR, near the Mongolian border — a 17-hour flight.
But the family needed a toilet. So off dad went.
How did he get the toilet home? He lugged it onto the Aeroflot flight, and sat on the toilet all the way back to Dnipro. Though a small man, Vladimir’s dad wrestled the toilet up into their apartment and installed it. There it remains to this day.
A system that makes a man have to fly 17 hours one way to get a new toilet through back channel connections, then ride all the way back home sitting on top of that commode — that’s not a system that works.
But my iphone should be free. /s
Those were the days!
Nice true story.
When I was a kid— the Cold War seemed to end when I was 25 and the Berlin Wall opened, without Russian tanks rolling to close it back up— I collected Soviet jokes like the ones President Reagan told in a clip referenced elsewhere in this thread.
I thought those days were over, but I heard a “new” one in the miniseries “Chernobyl”, which goes something like this:
—What is as big as a house, uses 1000 liters of diesel, and cuts an apple into three pieces?
—A Soviet machine to cut apples into four pieces.
Soviet toilets... One time in Kiev I used one. It was activated by a pull cord. I say “activated” because it want off like a Martin Baker rocket ejection seat. My rough estimate is that something like 300 gallons of water from the Dnieper went through it in about 4 seconds.
I thought I might actually get sucked in. Unreal.
And then of course, the apartment had no disposal in the kitchen. So the toilet did that duty as well. And did it with authority.
Two years ago we took a “Luther” tour. The Luther sites are in the former East Germany. A good percentage of the residences and small town business are still the drab concrete gray of the old days. Occasionally, during our bus travels, we would pass some housed that were painted gaudy colors, bright red, yellow, orange, etc.
During the Communist era, nobody owned the structures, so nobody took care of them, they were all concrete gray. When the wall came down, they did their best to return the properties to their previous owners. The bright colors were a response to the end of the years of repression. Private property existed again and the owners could do as they pleased.
The soviet miners— who took no crap at all from the soviet bosses— they had power of a sort.
Great joke- and the only levity in the entire movie that exposes the lunacy of the soviet system of bureaucrats and socialist climbers. 93K lost their lives in Chernobyl, but the Soviets made a law that physicians may not record deaths by radiation. Really. And so, to this day the official death count is from within the plant and just outside— the number being 31. 31. think of that kind of unbelievable corruption and falsehood.
They did not have the right ex-bartender in charge.
/s
“that’s not a system that works”
the communists kept power for how many decades and the people in deprivation fear and misery the whole time
You should ask them about the non-surfaced interior building walls with exposed pipes and the cheap CLEAR polystyrene used for the sewage drain pipes
The floors below got to see the results of what the people upstairs had eaten days before ....
Bernie’s version of this madness would work!
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