Indoor plumbing is one of the greatest inventions of modern times. No indoor corner bucket! No trekking in the cold to sit in a wood cabinet with a hole in the ground! Huzzah!
Except indoor plumbing always seems to be in a state of breaking whereas the hole in the ground, well, when it's full, I guess you just dig a new one a few feet over.
At least my indoor plumbing is always breaking. Sometimes it is my fault. Usually it is not.
Mostly I have issues with our tub/shower unit.
The drain clogging with my excessive hair loss that always makes me think I should get my thyroid checked but then I'm all, "nah," feels like my fault, but really I blame the drain.
It is as if a drain engineer thought, "I know! I'll make it have catchy bits so that women will constantly be having to unscrew the drain assembly ... genius! with a screwdriver! and remove a hair clot the size of a rat!"
Said engineer is in cahoots with the conditioner chemists. "Even better! I'll make sure the conditioner they use doesn't ever totally dissolve and so said hair clot you've devised will be disgusting, slimy, and look not only like a deflated rat, but also sort of like an aborted one as well!"
I now envision them snapping on their eye protection goggles merrily while going to work on their devious projects, beakers and blow torches in hand.
At least, that's what I think went into our shower tub plumbing assembly.
Today I found out, we also have devious faucet gnomes. Little fuckers.
I was all set to jump in for a super quick shower while Ada napped tenuously. To note, I looked insane. My hair was pinned haphazardly, my contact lenses failed me this morning so I had my glasses on, and really, the outfit wasn't very smart, either. So the shower was supposed to help wash everything back into normalcy.
The water was reaching temperature, so I reached in and pulled up the pull-uppy-make-it-a-shower-assembly and it proceeded to disintegrate in my hands.
I never put much thought into that assembly until today. Obviously you pull it up and some type of thing causes the water to redirect. I never questioned it.
Turns out there are five different pieces. A stick bit, the knob bit, a plastic clicky onto the stick bit bit, a round rubber washer seeming bit that I know isn't called a washer but has a name I can't place, flange maybe, and the tiniest of tiny round rubber washers. Nearly microscopic.
Unfortunately, I had totally expected to be taking a shower and I had already disrobed. So, wrapping a towel around myself and pushing my glasses up one more time, I peered over the edge of the tub and up the faucet. That faucet bit is its own little labyrinth of molded metal. A couple of failures, flubbed fingers, glasses slipping off the face, and much (very quiet as the kid was napping) much cursing, I finally got it right. For now.
I cannot wait until it disintegrates in Jeffrey's hand and the microscopic washer goes down the drain (where my hair clot will potentially catch it, but knowing our luck, it won't) and we are stuck with a "bath only" option until someone can come and repair it for good as I'm certain Jeffrey won't be found doubled over and upside down trying to put it back together again.
Fortunately, we have two other bathrooms with showers. Indoor plumbing is great as long as you always have excessive amounts of bathrooms to shift to ... but then you have to clean them.
Maybe we aren't really ready for home ownership.
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