Last updated April 12, 2019
An accidentally flushed old cell phone turned into a sticky situation for a 45-year-old woman from Lincoln in the United States a week ago. Cindy Hruza accidentally flushed her cell phone down the toilet but rather than panic or call a plumber, the resourceful woman decided to attempt rescuing the device herself – only to end up with an arm trapped up to the elbow in a toilet drain.
Hruza, who works in administration at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, had only recently dismantled a toilet in the course of remodeling a bathroom, so she turned off the toilet’s water valve, unbolted it, and tried to see if it rattled. When it failed to, Hruza assumed the phone had made it into the floor pipes. Looking into the drain, Hruza could still not see the cell phone but since the pipe turns just below the floor, Hruza decided to take a risk. “I was hoping to get lucky, basically,” she notes. Hruza reached in up to and then past her elbow, but could still not locate the phone – and then found she couldn’t pull her arm back out again. With no one else in the house, bar her cat, which “came in and looked at me like I was an idiot”, Hruza managed to kick open her bathroom cabinet and knock some supplies down on the ground, including a tube of antiseptic ointment that had a texture similar to Vaseline and was able to use it to free herself. The next day, she found her cell phone – in the toilet’s P-trap.