My roommate and I started getting into the
Shameless-rhythm of tailoring our daily routine to deal with broken things around our home. (Just like TV's poor!) Recently our toilet broke. Not because of *ahem* "volume" but because our house was built in the '40s and our landlord is cheap. For whatever reason, after we'd flush, it would do this constant water-whine until we'd be forced to come back and hold the handle a certain way. It went on for like a month, but recently it looks like it healed itself! We didn't do anything to try and fix it so it's a wonder anything's changed. My guess is that since it's a machine that snacks on dookies, it was probably just a cry for help.
I LOLed. For real. <3 Jenking
ReplyDeleteAlthough it smacks of the singularity, machines fixing themselves is the tops.
ReplyDeleteEven better for me, though, is getting all "amateur home improvement" on the ass of some malfunctioning equipment. Just the other day I was driving around when a USPS mail truck guy signaled me to open my window.
"Hey! Your muffler is about to fall off!"
"...uh...Thanks!...?"
I was late to work so I didn't pull over, but the last five minutes of the commute were spent waiting for the a "CLANGK" and the ensuing "KSRSHCHCHHHHH" that would indicate, "hey, there goes your muffler, but at least now it's dragging below you and making your car shit sparks like a Chinese New Year dragon after having some bad Indian food."
Fortunately, it made it the rest of the way, and I had the chance to stoop down in the snow and inspect what was wrong. Sure enough, a thick rubber band connecting one side of my muffler to the car by some hooks had broken, leaving its twin on the opposite side to take the brunt of the weight.
So I worked through the day, drove to Wal Mart, and searched for my solution: zip-ties.
Most people know what zip-ties are, but they don't necessarily know the name; until they hear it, anyway. I wandered around Wal Mart for twenty minutes searching for them, slipping through do-it-yourself repair and crafts before defaulting to electronics, the only place I knew a blue-shirt would almost always be. I told the girl behind the register that I was searching for zip-ties.
"...zip-ties?"
"You know, zip-ties - like, sometimes cops use them instead of handcuffs."
"Oh - hah, I was actually about to use that description, but thought it would be weird if you knew that was the first thing that came to my mind."
"Yeah, likewise."
She then suggested sporting goods, which sounded completely crazy to me. Sporting goods? Which sport uses zipties? She even paged another person in the store who gave her the same advice. Operating under some bizarre shared blue shirt logic, we started looking under sporting goods to no avail. FINALLY, another blue-shirt walked by who helped us immediately:
"Yeah, they're in electronics past the light bulbs."
So they were.
I ratcheted a good 3 ties onto the hook and raised the muffler a couple of inches back into place. Each tie claims to be capable of bearing 40 pounds, so 120 pounds seemed good enough for the night. I plan on adding a few more when I'm not laying down in the snow at night trying to use my cell-phone light to see what I'm doing :(
The moral of the story is that I like jury-rigging machines to work, even if the result is ugly and forces me to hang around Wal Mart for longer than anybody would like.
when i read, "Hey! Your muffler is about to fall off!" I'm so serious my first thought was "scarf from off your neck."
ReplyDeletei hate jerry rigging stuff. it's just a sign to me that my life isn't currently where i'd like it to be. glad you were able to sort your car out though.
and boy, would i sure love to see this story on one infant blog that I wont name...
I thought that after I saw how long it is -_-
ReplyDeleteand I didn't know that "jerry rig" was an accepted form of "jury rig," although its definition on www.thefreedictionary.com is, hilariously, "to jury-rig"