For this week’s challenge, write a poem or story about a situation where the best intentions resulted in the worst results. Serious, humorous, the choice is yours. The only rule is to have fun.
Oops
I Was Only Trying to Help
It began with a dripping tap.
Nothing dramatic.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
My wife had mentioned it several times.
Not complained, exactly.
Just occasionally stood beside the sink staring at it with the expression of someone contemplating murder.
So when she went shopping on Saturday morning, I decided to surprise her.
I would fix the tap.
How difficult could it be?
This sentence, I would later discover, has probably preceded most domestic catastrophes since the invention of plumbing.
I watched a four-minute video.
The man in the video fixed his tap in three minutes and forty-two seconds.
Easy.
I found a wrench.
Turned something.
The dripping stopped.
Success!
Then water shot vertically from beneath the sink and hit the ceiling.
I turned the thing back.
More water.
I turned another thing.
Even more water.
The cat entered the kitchen, took one look at the situation and left.
Sensible animal.
I remembered the video saying something about shutting off the water supply.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember whether this was supposed to happen before or after dismantling the tap.
I found a valve.
Turned it.
The kitchen water stopped.
Excellent.
Then the washing machine began making a noise normally associated with aircraft preparing for take-off.
I turned the valve back.
The washing machine stopped.
The kitchen fountain resumed.
At this point, I decided the problem was obviously the tap itself.
So I removed it.
This was surprisingly easy.
Putting it back was not.
I now had a tap in my hand, three mysterious rubber rings on the counter and one small metal object whose purpose remains unknown.
The doorbell rang.
My neighbour had come to tell me water was dripping through his ceiling.
This seemed unnecessarily dramatic considering he lived downstairs.
I apologised and assured him everything was under control.
At that exact moment, something behind me made a loud BANG.
The cat ran past us.
The neighbour looked into the kitchen.
“Do you want some help?”
“No, no. I’ve got it.”
Those were the last confident words I spoke that day.
Twenty minutes later, my neighbour was under the sink.
I was holding a bucket.
His teenage son was watching another tutorial.
The cat had moved onto the wardrobe upstairs.
And somebody had accidentally turned off the water to the entire building.
Then my wife came home.
She stood in the doorway carrying two shopping bags.
Nobody spoke.
Her eyes travelled slowly across the kitchen.
The towels covering the floor.
The dismantled cupboard.
The bucket.
The neighbour.
The neighbour’s son.
The tap lying on the counter.
Finally, she looked at me.
“What happened?”
I smiled.
“I fixed the dripping tap.”
Drip.
A single drop of water fell from the ceiling onto my head.
She closed her eyes.
Later, after the plumber had restored civilisation, she handed me the bill.
Across the top he had written:
REPAIR OF ATTEMPTED REPAIR.
My wife stuck it to the refrigerator.
Underneath, she added:
Verschlimmbessern.
German: to try to improve something and make it worse.
Then beneath that:
See also: my husband.
The tap no longer drips.
The ceiling has been repainted.
The neighbour eventually forgave me.
And I have learned something valuable.
Whenever my wife now says:
“Could you fix something for me?”
I answer:
“Absolutely.”
Then I call a professional.
Sometimes personal growth is knowing when not to improve things.
😂😂😂
With love, coffee, poetry, and stardust,
— Maggie The Afterlove Voice 💫
https://ditto.fm/silenced-but-not-broken
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