Bathtub Stoppers, the Dummy Version

bathtub popup stopper

People ask the weirdest questions at internet search engines. We know, we've asked some of them ourselves; questions like, "How do you install a through-the-wall dog door?" The website eHow.com made boatloads of money by harvesting those questions and letting "contributors" answer them. Or, punctuated more accurately, letting contributors "answer" them; since many of the contributors had no idea what they were talking about. A case in point is four-time DotD Alicia Bodine, whom we caught attempting to tell her readers the answer to the age-old question at Hunker.com, "How Does a Bathtub Drain-Stopper Work?"¹

We've found through extensive research (and a lot of migraines) that Bodine is pretty typical of eHow contributors in that she merely throws enough words on the page to 1) meet the minimum word count and 2) bamboozle a content editor who knows as little as Bodine (or even less) about the topic at hand. In this case, Alicia starts by explaining that

"In order to fill a bathtub full of water you must have a way to keep the water from going down the drain. A bathtub stopper can do this."

No duh, Alicia... so how does this stopper work? Well, according to Bodine, you have options such as "...the bathtub stopper that is round with a small ring at the top...is placed over the bathtub drain hole. It covers the hole and keeps the water from going down the drain allowing you to fill up your bathtub." It "works" by covering the hole... yeah. Next, we have "More modern bathtubs come with a bathtub stopper that screws in to place. The idea is to keep the bathtub stopper in the drain at all times. Then you just screw it in to make it tight enough to keep the water in the top, and unscrew it to let the water out."

We're pretty sure we've never seen one of those... perhaps they're common in China? Or maybe she's thinking of a toe-touch style? Who knows? And then we have

"...bathtubs...[with] a metal switch underneath the bathtub faucet. If you push the metal switch up, it locks the drain up so that the water cannot come out..."

Right: a "metal switch." Is it electrical, Alicia? Never heard of the word "lever"?

There are several ways to answer this question. One would be to explain how a stopper creates a watertight seal through friction and adhesion (physics). Another would be to explain how a linkage connects the "metal switch" to the stopper, which is probably what the OQ wanted to know — we say that because the workings of that sort of stopper are hidden (plumbing). Bodine, however, chose to simply list stopper types with childish descriptions and half-assed explanations of the workings. Small wonder she's picking up yet another Dumbass of the Day award...

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how-does_4579047_bathtub-drainstopper-work.html

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