I paid a plumber an absurd amount of money to fix a leaking showerhead.
I’m not proud of that.
The repair required twenty bucks’ worth of parts and took the plumber all of ten minutes.
But it was beyond me.
I really have no business picking up a tool. I wasn’t born with the fix-it gene most guys were.
And that’s occasionally been a problem.
When I was twelve, my grandfather chewed me out for not fixing the locking mechanism in the door of my mother’s car when my dad was out of town on business.
“You have to start taking responsibility around here!” he scolded me as I held a flashlight at various angles while he “taught” me to disassemble the door and replace the mechanism.
“You see how I did that?” he asked me when he was finished. “Next time, you do it!”
I was so absurdly unqualified for the task, it was like telling me to give my little brother a kidney transplant the next time he got a stomachache.
Things haven’t really changed.
Today, when I attempt to repair something in my house, it either me takes all day, or I break it worse and pay someone to fix it anyway.
And that all follows my first course of action, which is to just ignore the problem and see if it fixes itself.
The shower did not fix itself. After a week of dripping, I had to shut the water off to the entire house before I left for work every morning.
“You plan to do something about that?” my wife asked.
In due course, I told her.
I eventually watched a YouTube video on how to swap out the guts of the water shutoff assembly behind the shower handle. That apparently fixes the problem. And the guy with the beard and trucker hat made it seem easier than brushing your teeth.
It all starts with removing the little setscrew that attaches the shower handle to the shutoff assembly.
Of course, it’s at the bottom of the handle, requiring that I contort myself into an awkward position, just to get a tool on the damn thing.
And, the whole time, water is dripping in my face as the shower head drains, which takes, like, half an hour.
I have this multi-tool thing, with Allen wrenches of various sizes.
I try four of them. None works. Of course.
I go down to the basement to find the Tupperware container in which I keep my random assortment of other Allen wrenches. These are the little, ninety-degree metal things that come with appliances and small pieces of furniture that you use to put them together. I’ve collected about fifteen of them.
I take my collection and go back to the shower.
And, of course, none of those works, either.
So now I’m thinking I must have stripped the setscrew. There’s no way that at least one of the ten wrenches I’ve tried isn’t the correct size.
I contort myself back under the shower handle to give it one more try.
I take what has to be the correct size wrench and insert it into the screw. But it just spins around inside the screw head without grabbing onto anything.
Yup, it’s stripped. And I think that means it has to be drilled out.
And that means I’m finished with this stupid shower.
See, there are two types of guys. One, like me, who quits in a situation like this. And the other type that says, “F--- you, setscrew! I will not let you defeat me!” and goes charging off to the hardware store.
I would have been screwed in medieval times. Or any other time you had to make a living with your hands.
Whereas the guy who relishes a mechanical challenge would have built and fixed his way through life, I would have been left to ingratiate myself to some feudal lord by . . . I don’t know, writing him a poem or doing his taxes or something. There’s no way I could have survived on my own.
So I admire guys like this plumber.
I tell him I think the setscrew is stripped and leave it to him to drill it out.
Ten minutes later, he comes to find me in my office.
“Okay,” he says. “You’re all set.”
Already? I ask. What about the screw?
“Came right out,” he says.
What?
Turns out, I was using standard wrenches on a metric screw. Or metric on a standard. Whatever.
The plumber has an extensive Allen wrench collection and simply found the correct size.
No drilling required.
He’s very gracious about it. He gives me a look that says, “That’s okay. I know this is hard for you.”
And he’s right. It is. So I pay.
No, I’m not proud of that.
So don’t call me when your shower head’s leaking.
Or anything else, for that matter.
Just call the plumber. Or some other dude with an ounce of mechanical ability.
But do feel free to hit me up for a poem, if ever you’re in the mood.
The plumber’s got nothing on me there.