Читать книгу Here on the Coast - Howard White - Страница 16

My intentions were the best. That nobody can deny. Our office used to have a dishwasher, back when it was a house. There was a hole for it. The pipes were still dangling from the wall. Then a working dishwasher became surplus when my wife decided to update hers for one of the new environmentally friendly models—I argued that environmentally friendly dishwashers are like environmentally friendly SUVs, but I didn’t expect to win that one—so I decided to surprise the staff by installing the surplus one in the office.

I don’t know why, but washing coffee cups in our office was at that time one of those tasks that seemed to be beyond our organizational abilities. In their regular roles our staff did the work of companies three times our size, but show them a coffee cup in need of rinsing and they just kind of went pale and staggered away groaning. I had tried everything to convince people they could rise to this challenge, to no avail. Now it occurred to me a nicely broken-in GE Potscrubber would solve one of the great miseries at the heart of our work experience and guarantee me hero status for at least a week.

I dragged the beast up the stairs to the lunchroom one evening and, lying on my back and kicking with both legs, bullied it into the old hole. Everything lined up just like it was meant to.

I like to think of myself as handier than the average couch potato. I can join up wires with those little plastic dunce-cap thingies. I don’t really know how a dishwasher works, but I can figure out that the big hose goes on the big pipe and the little one goes on the little. Even when it came to the plastic pressure fittings with several little bits inside, I managed to put them together without anything left over. I fired the relic up and checked for drips. Perfectly dry. I loaded it with week-old cups and soup bowls with concretized food in them, filled the soap holder and set the dial at extra-heavy duty. And went away.

But there was something bothering me. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was, but it bothered me all night. It was still bothering me in the morning, so I went down to the office early to see if I could figure out what it was.

When I opened the door to the ground-level floor, I had an odd sensation. The atmosphere was like, like—a swimming pool. Chlorine in the air. And I could hear water splashing. I stepped into the main room where all the copiers and printers are, and sank into ankle-deep water. I looked down the hallway past all the offices and it was ankle-deep all the way. The stairs to the upper floor where the lunchroom is were now the site of a very picturesque waterfall.

Then it came to me: maybe it would have been better to do the trial dishwasher load in the daytime when you could keep an eye on it. Just in case I’d guessed wrong about which way the bevel was supposed to face on one of those bits in the pressure fitting …

It is hard to say what was worst, the shock of realizing what I had done, the ignominy of explaining just how this disaster had come about to my unamused colleagues, the three miserable months of working under sheets of plastic with drywall dust raining down on our heads, or getting the bill for $20,000. I’m willing to call it a tie.

At least I got to find out what restorers do. My restorer was a jolly fellow who made me feel much better by telling me how many others shared my misfortune. He had thirteen dishwasher malfunctions on the go at that very moment, including one at the home of my next-door neighbour, who had lost a newly installed hardwood floor for his pains. He seemed so sympathetic I decided to take him into my confidence and confess I felt like a bit of a fool over the way my handiwork worked out.

“Oh, we love do-it-yourselfers!” he said with a chuckle. “You keep us in business.” Somehow that left me feeling not so good again.

The only good thing that came out of it was that people have completely stopped asking me to fix things around the office. And remarkably, I haven’t seen a sink load of dirty dishes for months. I may have finally got my message across.