When we bought this place, one of the things that gave me a totally disproportionate amount of joy was the discovery that there is an outdoor tap on our patio. Yeah, I’m easily amused. But then, I grew up in the country.
Anyway, shortly after we moved in, we made a celebratory trip to Home Depot and began turning into full-time yuppies, looking at light fixtures and tile sealer and all that. And I went to the hose aisle and proudly picked out a midrange hose and sprayer with all the different profiles that were so endlessly fascinating when I was a wee child playing with the hose in summertime. (Keep your dirty jokes to yourselves — this is a special memory here.)
You know, Jet Stream. Cone. The delightful Mist. Etc.
So I brought my new toy home and hooked it up, all excited about watering my plants. (Have you forgotten already? I grew up in the country.)
The hose worked, but emitted a sad little trickle from both ends, as though suffering from some terminal veneral disease. This was disappointing, but not too much so. Still, Home Depot is a long drive away, and I’m lazy. So I let it dribble away for a couple of months, until I started getting irritated about ending up with cold, wet hands every time I watered the plants.
It was time to do something… something lazy with a so-so chance of working.
I visited the local Canadian Tire on Wednesday (my second mistake, I know) and picked up a roll of plumber’s “emergency repair” tape. Forms a solid bond of rubber! Instantly fixes leaky pipes and hoses! Of course it does.
After working myself up to a mild frenzy over the wild promises on the tape package (”This HAS to work! It will be awesome!”), I paid my eight bucks and brought home this surefire remedy.
Yesterday morning, I taped the living shit out of both ends of the hose until it looked like a hockey stick. Then, smug, I turned it on. It emitted an infinitessimally small mist from the bottom of the taped-up sprayer handle, but I could live with it. Feeling guardedly triumphant, I watered the plants, surveyed my work, and headed inside still gloating about my almost-completely dry hands. Nothing in life is 100%, so I felt satisfied enough to call this a victory.
To celebrate, I started mucking around with the CSS stylesheet for my blog. (Yes, I am a boring geek. Up yours.) About half an hour later, I had the following conversation with my beautiful fiancee:
Lindsie: Babe, you left the hose on. Can you turn it off?
Curtis: (Fucking around with broken CSS like a lost, desperate child, totally distracted, thinking Lindsie has spotted the fine mist still sprinkling out of the nozzle end of the hose) Yeah, in a minute.
(An hour passes uneventfully; Curtis takes a shower and emerges wearing towel)
Lindsie: Um, babe, I think you’d better turn the hose off right now.
Curtis: Suffering fucking Jesus!
A bit of background; our beautiful patio is a two-level wooden deck, with sliding doors that open from our living room and bedroom. It is the centrepiece of our sweet condo. (Note Canadian -re spelling! Matches this blog’s .ca domain!)
We’re on the second floor, so the patio decking actually rests on the concrete ceiling of the parkade that extends south from our building toward the alley. This facilitates a 400 square foot outdoor space, south-facing with southern exposure. Again, it is extremely awesome.
By “you left the hose on,” Lindsie meant “the water pressure has blown the nozzle off.”
And that was an hour ago… meaning that the hose had had time to completely fill the space below the deck with water. It looked like a raft floating on a lake.
Muttering a special sentence that I save for just such occasions, I stepped out and discovered that the deck, not unlike a raft, was floating on the pool of water. Water squirted up between the boards and I staggered a little, clutching my towel and noting the eerie sensation that I seemed to be stepping out of my bedroom onto a seafaring vessel.
Interesting, I thought. Our deck is not attached to anything. If you leave a hose on for an hour, how much would all that water weigh?
I turned off the hose and the two of us scratched our heads a bit (but not in as casual a manner as that might sound) and wondered what the hell to do. The water level was literally half an inch below the sill of the sliding door, and probably six inches deep below that. When I made waves with the raft/deck, they splashed like little breakers onto the inner sill. Five more minutes with the hose and there would have been little waterfalls flowing cheerily into our living room and bedroom.
Below our suite is a parkade and the back half of a couple of businesses that are accustomed to a dry working environment and are definitely not prepared to accommodate a sudden influx of a few hundred gallons of water, should any protective membranes give way.
There is an almost imperceptible slope to the deck that leads down to a drain, the capacity of which had obviously been exceeded by the output of the hose the better part of an hour earlier. Panicking, we bailed a few buckets’ worth of water, but it was slow going — we had to stand on the deck to weigh it down, then scoop with a drinking glass.
After the initial panic subsided, we thought better of our lame recovery project and decided to let the drain do what drains do. So we took a bike ride to Locarno Beach, where I went for a delightful and rejuvenating swim.
The drain did its thing, albeit slowly, and we returned to find a soggy but landlocked deck covered in all the filth and junk that has fallen between the boards in the last five months: sawdust, cigarette butts, and random unidentifiable sludge. Your typical post-flood scenario on a condo-size scale.
And that’s pretty much the end of the story. No harm done, just some momentary panic over being liable for our lifetime’s earning potential in water damage.
My fault, you say? The hell with that. So I bought the $30 hose instead of the $50. For thirty bucks, a hose should move water from a tap to a nozzle. This is not unreasonable to expect. I’m not asking for an end to world hunger (though of course that would be cool) — just a hose that doesn’t give way and flood my nice condo.
And no, I didn’t take pictures of the water — do I look like a journalist?
But for the record, I would like to point out that reinforcing an item with emergency tape should not cause that item to come apart. It seems clear to me that both the tape and the hose actually hate me and wish me drowned in my luxury condo.
So fuck them. Later this week, I will subject them to some sort of ritualistic mutilation ceremony with a lighter and a pair of scissors to cheer myself up. It will be great — far more fun than going to Home Depot for a boring old refund. Stay tuned!
Say your prayers, hose. Nozzle, sleep tight.
Oh yeah — and screw you, Home Depot.
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