Not About The Election

I had another plumbing adventure today. Last Wednesday my Meals-On-Wheels lady that I've had for 8 years told me her downstairs toilet was running. This is the lady for whom I have replaced two faucets. (Man was that an awkward sentence or what?) Anyway, AGAIN I forgot my camera so I made my own illustrations. When I pulled the top off last Wednesday, I saw that she had the old ball cock type thing in there. (I do not know many plumbing terms so don't laugh at me but ball cock is correct.)

Well these old things are no good so I told her I would replace it with the new kind which I did not know the name of until just now whan I googled "ball cock." The new kind is called "floating cup." I bought a Fluidmaster replacement kit yesterday and headed over there this afternoon after I voted. I figured it would take me about 30 minutes to do this. Ha ha ha ha. 30 minutes my eye. What happened was, when I pulled out the old plastic thingie, there was this stupid little metal tube sticking up into the tank.

There was no way to fit the new thing over that stupid metal pipe, so I figured I would remove the stupid metal pipe. But what happened was the shut off valve handle was sticking up over the nut which was already in a tight little spot.

As I drove over to Ace Hardware to get a flex pipe piece to replace the stupid metal pipe I got the idea to call one of my MOW guys that used to be a handyman type of guy. He told me there was a little screw in the shut off valve and I could use a Phillip's Head screwdriver to remove it. So I bought the new flex pipe and some rubber grippers so my channel lock thing wouldn't strip the cheap nut. I got back to the house and sure enough, there was that little screw and it came right out. I then used my channel locks and rubber gripper to remove the stupid metal tube. Unfortunately when I tried to fit the flex tube part over the thing it was too small. Because I was getting flustered at this point, I failed to notice the weird shape of the metal piece coming out of the wall.

Instead of just threads, there was this round ball-shaped thing (see above). All I did was find the guy again and tell him the thing was too small. The lady at the register was confused about how to make the exchange between a $3.99 piece and a $4.49 piece and said she would like to just charge me the difference and began to walk away. Man I thought I was bad about doing math in my head! I said, "It's fifty cents!" So she came back and I gave her fifty cents. Then halfway back I somehow remembered that weird ball-shaped thing. I pulled over and looked at my new piece and realized that it would not work. Then went back for my THIRD time. The guy knew what I was talking about but the connecting piece was designed for the original $3.99 flex pipe. So I went back to the poor lady at the register who still had that piece that I had bought the first time and told her I needed to change back to that and get this attachment and I had grabbed a diet Pepsi out of the case there. She tried to charge me $7 and some change and I said, "No that's not right. How much is the attachment and the Pepsi and now you owe me fifty cents." She was very flustered and said, "Okay, how about you give me $4.32 and we call it a day?" I said, "Okay, that's seems okay and I promise I will not come back." We both laughed. I went back and everything fit fine and I was done. So what I thought would take about 30 or 40 minutes took almost 3 hours. My MOW lady had the elections on the TV the whole time and said, "I will always remember this night with the elections and you coming and going and coming and going."