I Break For Plumbers
I decided to save a few dollars and work on my car’s rear brakes myself. I bought the new brake pads and spent the next few hours crawling around under the car, cursing and teaching myself how to do it, and about four hours later it was done. The first wheel took about 2 hours, but after that I knew what I was doing, so the second one only took about 20 minutes. Yes, I know the math doesn’t add up. I took breaks — a lot of them.
I was very proud of myself when I was finished. Filthy, achy and tired, but proud. I got in the car and started backing out of the driveway to go out for a test drive, and at the next-t0-last second I remembered the pipe and faucet for the garden hose that stick up out of the ground next to the driveway right behind where I was backing up. I stabbed my foot at the bra–
Crunch.
Yeah, I backed over it. That “next-to-last second” that I thought of it? It was the second after I hit, not before, so the wrong side of “last.”
Picture water geysering up out of the ground, There Will Be Blood style, but instead of Daniel Day-Lewis running around covered in oil and celebrating how rich it was going to make him, it was me running around waterlogged regretting how much it was going to cost me to fix it.
I fixed my brakes, so of course I needed a plumber. Sigh…