carbonel

Yesterday night, I decided I wanted some ice cream. I had no clean bowls (I only have three of the size bowl I put ice cream and yogurt in), so I washed the bowls and the few other dishes that had accumulated in the sink. When I was done, I stepped over to dry my hands -- and stepped into a small puddle.

I looked under the sink, and sure enough, everything in there was wet. When I ran the water, I could see water dripping from around the garbage disposal. I mopped things up as best I could, left everything out to dry, and had my ice cream.

This morning, I sent Greg Cotton an e-mail, explaining my plight. It wasn't an emergency, because nothing was leaking unless I ran the water, but I thought the chance of getting a plumber on the Friday of Independence Day weekend was zero. And besides, his boat is in my garage, and dealing with this sort of thing occasionally is the usual payment. He called me not long after, and said he'd be over in a couple of hours to take a look at it, but it was probably a gasket, which was an easy fix.

"A couple of hours later" would be around 11 am, but this was Greg, so when he hadn't shown up at 1 pm, I called him. Sure enough, he'd gotten buried in other tasks, but would be over as soon as he'd taken a shower. I checked to make sure he didn't need to build the shower first (old joke), which he didn't, and he arrived about an hour later.

After a brief poke around the underbelly of my sink, he determined that it wasn't the gasket; rather, my garbage disposal that had corroded enough to be leaking, and it needed replacing. He offered to go with me to Home Depot to get a new one. I shamefacedly said that I had a work project that I had to get done today, and asked if he could get it for me if I gave him money. Luckily, for once I had the cash available, so no need to fiddle with credit cards with the wrong name. He said that it was a two-part installation, and he could do the easy part that would get me able to use the sink again, but he didn't have time to set it in properly right now. I was fine with that.

He came back a while later with the new unit, and disappeared under the sink again. I went back to work on my project. I finished around 5 pm, and he finished shortly thereafter. He told me that he ended up doing the whole job, putty and all, so no need for a follow-up.

Apparently I was very lucky on the timing, because he's home for a couple of days, then off to spend three days in flight refresher school. I'm just grateful I didn't have the spend the weekend without a functioning sink.