Is a piece of my kitchen faucet assembly. This little gizmo has A Lifetime Guarantee.
Contrary to what the naive might think, a Lifetime Guarantee is no guarantee that this little gizmo will function as specified for a lifetime - be it yours, mine, or its own. What "Lifetime Guarantee" means is that when this little gizmo spectacularly malfunctions, spraying water all over the inside of the kitchen cabinets, turning the kitchen garbage into a soggy compost bomb and the paper recycling into papier mache, pouring water out of the cabinets all over the hardwood, and leaving a sleepy coffee-deprived homeowner with surprisingly wet feet for being indoors on a dry day, you get a new one for free.
Claiming your new little gizmo has some prerequisites. First you have to turn off the water supply, and since you're crawling around in a half-inch of water in the kitchen cabinet anyway, you might as well mop up too. Then you have to find the malfunctioning part in the tangle of tubing and piping, a process which involves spraying more water all over to identify where the water is coming from, then turning the water supply back off again. Next step: figure out how to disconnect it. The disconnection process will be made more complicated by the fact that the gizmo appears to have been attached with a wrench, judging by the tool marks all over it despite the bright orange sticker on it that says "Hand Tighten Only" (possibly a cause of the failure, as the gizmo appears to have exploded along a spiral fracture line suspiciously following the tool marks). The disconnection will also involve skinned and bruised knuckles as it is wedged into THE most contorted position amongst the other pipes and tubes, and of course we must also endure the minor head injury that seems almost mandatory when any under-sink plumbing ventures occur.
Then, you're nearly home free. The last part of the Lifetime Guarantee replacement process is to find the plumbing supply place that has one in stock. In a fit of rational smartness, I got on the net and the phone and called before driving all over town (hint: Home Depot doesn't seem to carry this manufacturer!), and only had to go a few kilometres to the next-to-nearest Home Hardware. Today we love the GlenBriar Plumbing Showcase, the nice parts folks had even set the replacement aside for me after my call, and wandered out into the aisles to meet me when they noted a soggy perplexed woman with the gizmo in hand checking the shelves for similar looking parts.
From there, it was back home, and repeat the previous paragraphs all in reverse (minus the mopping up as I was not dumb enough to turn the water back on before reconnecting everything).
And this, dear reader, is why none of programming homework, quilting, knitting, or my taxes have yet been done today.
2 comments:
I just want to say, in my defence, that I was not home to help because I'd wandered off to Listowel to teach improv for a Sears Drama Festival workshop - and things had not gone to Poseiden's Solarium until after I'd left.
Kudos to Johanna for going toe-to-toe with the fixtures on her own.
Adam
Adam had a chance to get his hand in too, as the new connector initiated its own flood by blowing off it's spigot while I was cleaning up dinner. Nothing wrong with it, just that I didn't have the hand strength to shove it all the way closed.
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