Guy accidentally ruins plumbing in entire building after filling his tub with Orbeez

There are fewer things that go more viral on the internet than a well-documented case of things just going wrong for someone. Our species loves some schadenfreude for whatever reason, which is why we love seeing people have ice buckets dropped on their heads, getting kicked in the groin, and falling flat on their face for cheating in a grape-stomping contest. 

You can add this French guy's Orbeez bathtub "experiment" to that list.

If you're not familiar with Orbeez, then you either haven't had a kid excitedly extol the virtues of these little balls to you for an hour nonstop, or you have a deep-seated aversion towards profoundly stupid and cheap-to-produce fad toys (I'm looking at you, Pogs) and avoid th

Basically, they are these little polymer balls that are adept at absorbing water, and are known to grow over 100 times their original size.  

Any parent with an Orbeez-obsessed kid will tell you how annoying it is to get rid of these things. Something this French guy probably wasn't aware of when he decided to start playing with them in the first place.

Look at him demonstrating how they work in this video. Then, he gets a not-so-bright idea: why not fill his bathtub up with the Orbeez, that could be cool, right?

Admittedly, there is something relaxing about squishing the Orbeez between your fingers, so why not experience that sensation all over your body? Well, because Orbeez are annoying as hell to clean up, which this man found out the hard way.

After the little balls blew up to their full size and he got bored of having a tub filled to the brim with squishy polymers, he tried to get rid of them.

Trouble is, he tried to do it the easy way by just pulling the drain in his tub and letting them all flood through the sewer system. Here's where things get crazy, though: it turns out the drains in his home are all connected and Orbeez began shooting up out of every plumbing fixture. His toilet, his sinks, everything in his house connected to that pipeline was now infested with Orbeez. 

To make matters even worse, the young man discovered the outside sewer lines were also backed up with Orbeez, which began affecting his neighbors' plumbing as well.

Pretty soon, the tubs, sinks, and toilets of everyone on his block were plagued by his Orbeez, and officials went on the lookout for whoever was behind this act of Orbeez-themed sewage terrorism.

A Town Hall letter indicated their search for the culprit at large, and he ended things by saying a few people were on to him and his antics. I guess putting the videos online and not immediately taking them down was a pretty bad idea on his part, which led many to believe this is all some sort of elaborate prank for internet points. 

Which it very well could be. Our Orbeez-obsessed friend could be taking the web's collective disdain for the annoying new toy and our time-honored delight in the suffering of others, and combined them to craft a hilarious comedy of errors that gets progressively worse. 

If it is fake, you have to give him props for staging the destruction of a vacuum, filling his house up with Orbeez, and digging holes outside to make it look like the Orbeez came from the sewage system. Oh, and the work he did to make that town hall letter look so official was pretty good, the footer on the bottom was a nice touch. I still don't know how he got poop water to shoot out the bottom of his sink though. 

What do you think? Is our French friend faking it? Or is he in deep merde for his little internet stunt?