plumber

The best part of my day is after workout when I'm all sweaty and disheveled, and I go into the bathroom and splash cold water on my face and wet my hair and redo my ponytail. It's so refreshing when you're exhausted.

Last night I come out of the bathroom and Sr makes me go back in.

"Do you hear that sound?"

"Um, the toilet running?"

"Yes, whenever you hear that sound, lift off the lid and pull on the chain because that means it's caught and it's just losing water."

"What chain?"

So he comes in there and shows me. I'm still not understanding the chain, I was pulling on the wrong one. He shows me how to move it and I finally saw what was going on. The angle of the rod was such that when it was flushed (simple levers and pulleys), it caught on a plastic tube support and hung there, leaving the stopper above the level of the water and consequently causing leakage.

"So every time someone flushes, this gets caught...can you design some sort of mechanism to fix it?"

Yeah right, like I don't have enough to do already and like they haven't volunteered me to do even more stuff than that. Now he wants me to fix a toilet? The parts are way old, maybe you should just replace them with working parts!

But actually the problem turned out to be easier than I thought. The rod looked like it was aluminum or something similar, by the oxidation...so I just bent it back into a different angle.

Sr looks at me in disbelief as he pulled the handle and it flushed normally.

"Yep, that's why I'm going to community college"

He laughs. They can't call me stupid now! It felt good to do something practical, using my expensive education. Maybe my brain hasn't completed atrophied yet. Yay, me! My inner dork rejoices.