Herb Kauderer
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The Quiet Terror and Occasional Brilliance of Plumbing

10/13/2015

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​When it comes to home repairs I much prefer working on electrical items, carpentry, or even masonry.  Plumbing is at the bottom of my list.  And yet I have been involved in occasional plumbing projects for over forty years. 
 
Electrical work fits my temperament.  On any given attempt, there are only three likely outcomes, and I achieve the outcome quite quickly.  The electrical project works, doesn’t work, or I get electrocuted.  Any way you look at it, I immediately know where I stand.
 
It’s only with plumbing where you can feel like the project is solved, only to discover three years later you were wrong because the upstairs bathtub falls into the downstairs kitchen due to an undiscovered slow leak.  For the record, that hasn’t happened to me yet, but appears to have happened in our house some years before we owned it.
 
And as long as I’m throwing in disclaimers, I’ll add this.  Two years ago we hired a licensed electrician to do some small work around the house.  Something about my attitude regarding electrical work made my wife uncomfortable with me doing more of it.  I was very happy to see someone else doing labor usually relegated to me, but I couldn’t help noticing that he worked in much the same way as me.  He did not turn off the electricity, nor wear gloves.  I think it made him very careful.  Me, too.
 
Today’s (and yesterday’s) project was replacing a broken pipe below the kitchen sink.  All the pipes were made of PVC plastic of the kind that comes in standardized kits.  Those kits are a small brilliance. 
 
I removed the offending piece of plastic pipe and went to the hardware store with it.  They had a piece that looked just like it except the top nut screwed downward instead of upward.  None of their sink hardware worked for a sink with threads on the bowl downspout.
 
Over the last forty years, every sink but one that I have worked on required a nut that screwed upward.  Or was I just going crazy?
 
The next hardware store also had downward-only pieces.  And the next hardware store.  At this point I did what I should have done in the first place, and researched it on the internet.  Lowe’s had the correct piece.  When I went there I saw that two thirds of all their sink plumbing had upward turning nuts.  I was grateful for the endorsement to my sanity.
 
At this point I went home, added a gasket missing from the kit, and assembled all the pipes below the kitchen sink using no tools.  That’s another example of brilliance: no tools plumbing.
 
You can be certain that I have dramatically simplified and reduced a process that took about seven hours spread over two days.  There were a lot more complications than are fun to read about, and I didn’t even swear or say colorful things.  I wrote a blog instead.
 
Now for the quiet terror of waiting to find out if the repairs were perfect.  Tick, tick, tick,... drip, drip, drip..........
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    Herb Kauderer

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  • Home
    • About
    • Contact
    • Orthopedic Horseshoes
  • Academics
    • Teaching Experience
    • Education
    • Courses Taught
    • Professional Affiliations & Recognitions
    • Academic Presentations & Related Materials
    • Full Curriculum Vitae
  • Poetry
    • Poetry Chapbooks & Other Books
    • Poetry Samples
    • Links to My Poetry On-Line
    • "My First 508"
    • Interviews and Featured Poet appearances
    • Featured Readings
  • Writing
    • Accolades
    • Drama
    • Book Reviews >
      • 'Sacrificial Nights'
      • Moon Facts by Bob Scholfield
      • What Stranger Miracles
      • Crowned: Sign of the Dragon Book 1
      • 'The Role of Lightning in Evolution'
      • 'Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek' by Timons Esaias
      • Brief Encounters with My Third Eye
    • Flash Fiction Links
    • Prose >
      • Short Fiction Bibliography
      • "A Dwarf for Each"
      • "Standard Repair"
      • "Sense of Place, Sense of Mystery"
      • Intro - Come-on from the Horse on 7th Avenue
      • "No Sense Fighting"
  • The SCA
    • SCA Photos 1
    • SCA Photos 2
    • Precedence for Andreas Hak
    • SCA Persona
    • Offices Held in the SCA
    • SCA Writings >
      • Serenity: A History of Eastern Coronets
      • "The Origin of The Betting Man's Guide
      • "The New Newsletter"
      • Old Newsletters
      • "The New Newsletter"
      • "When the VOID Was One"
      • "The Hael's First Baronial Champions Event"
      • "Aftermeetings: An Excuse to Tell Svid Stories"
      • "The Origin of Aethelmearc's Ancestral Pelican Medallion"
      • Remembering Durlome Rakesh d'Mithnan (Dwarf)
      • Growth Chart of Kingdoms for the First 23 Years of the SCA
      • Doings... An incomplete and informal chronology of the earliest days of Aethelmearc
      • History of the East Kingdom
  • Something Like a Blog