- Have the dentist tell you they want to do about $2000 worth of work inside your mouth, after they’ve already done roughly $900 worth.
- Hearing that your new dental insurance will only cover the first $1000 worth of work the dentist wants to do.
- Take your car to the mechanic to have the brakes checked and the wiper fixed1.
- Driving past a perfect photo opportunity and realizing your camera is sitting on your desk at home.
- Have your wife call you the next day telling you the mechanic told her the car was done and the bill was $3761!
- Go to the mechanic to find out your wife needs to clean out her ears as your brakes are fine and the mechanic only charged us $37.61 to fix the wiper.
- Find out the sample data you’ve been playing with at work was the wrong file from the data provider and you’re going to have to recreate all the same work all over again.
- See large puddles of water in your basement. Water seeping in from a side of the basement which has never gotten wet before.
- Figure out the plastic pipe from the sump-pump outside the house has come un-clamped from the bit of pipe running away from the house.
- Narrowly dodge a vast spray of water coming from the sump-pump.
- Quickly re-clamp the pipes, hoping not to get soaked.
- Watch the sump-pump force the water out a crack in the pipe, spraying down your neighbor’s fence.
- Unplugging the sump-pump, going outside, cutting away the cracked portion of the pipe, re-clamping the pipes, send the wife down into the basement to plug in the sump-pump, standing back hoping the clamp will hold.
- Watching the clamp still leak.
- Deciding to go back inside anyway.
- While putting your tools away realize one of the joints on the interior sump-pump piping is now leaking more than when you started.
- Being told to shut-off the outside lights when you’re grabbing some slippers to go back to the switch to turn the lights off.
- Writing 3744 fewer items in your list of 3761 ways to go bonkers.
1 The driver-side windshield wiper kept coming loose and wouldn’t wipe the windshield.
Madness!
After burning out our sump pump since I left our hose clamped to the outlet all winter (frozen doesn’t work), we paid $250 for a new pump. I cut the hose so it wouldn’t be so long that it would freeze again, but not so short that it dumps water on the side of the house. Now that it’s above freezing again, I bought another 24′ hose from Tru-Value for $15. Money well spent, my man. That and some plumber’s putty might reduce your woes.
The interior leak isn’t that bad and I’ll probably just wrap some of the handyman’s secret weapon around it for now. When it gets a bit drier out, I might look into replacing/patching up that bit of interior pipe.
The above post was more me ranting against the universe than anything else.