After 28 years of marriage to an unhandy man, she should have known better.
But the water filter needs changing and the directions on the box say — and I quote — “changing the water filter cartridge is a simple matter.”
Step one is to “Shut off the main water supply.” Which immediately makes it a not-so-simple matter, because there are roughly a hundred shut-offs under the sink and I don’t know which one is the main. So I turn the handles on all of them, hope for the best and proceed to step two, which is “unscrew the filter body from the cap.”
After 15 minutes of struggling to unscrew the filter body, I decide what I need to do is disconnect the filter from one of the hoses to which it’s attached. So I loosen the nut that connects the hose to the filter body. Which is when I discover that none of the handles I turned was the main shut-off.
Water shoots out of the hose, which slips out of my hand and begins spraying water all over the kitchen as it writhes out of control. I immediately do what I do best in situations like this. I panic. In desperation, I grab the writhing hose and try to reconnect it. But it’s like trying to put a hat on a snake. The hose keeps writhing. The water keeps spraying.
The hose and I battle for approximately 10 minutes and the hose clearly is winning until I notice a blue lever under the sink I hadn’t turned. I turn the lever. The water stops. I am victorious.
Except for the flood on the kitchen floor.
I race to the linen closet, grab as many towels as I can carry and try to soak up the water before my wife gets home. While I’m doing that I get a text from her saying she’s leaving the store and will be home soon. I ignore it. If I reply with a message to “keep shopping,” she’ll be highly suspicious.
By the time she gets home the kitchen is semi-dry, but now we have approximately 200 pounds of soggy towels. The good news is that I’ll know that the blue lever is the main shut-off the next time she asks me to change the filter.
Although I’m pretty sure she’d drink unfiltered water directly from a lake with dead fish floating in it before she would do that again.
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