Home repairs

Today's screed is a convoluted defense of a liberal arts education.  Perhaps remarkably it begins with the repair of a toilet.

I've done a toilet repair once before.  It's never pleasant.  Besides being faced with tight, cramped spaces, one is unavoidably putting one's face near where the backside typically resides during business hours.  Some might argue that for me, that's one and the same thing, but I digress.

For someone my size -- 6'2", nevermind the weight -- fitting my frame into the aforementioned tight and cramped spaces is tough enough.  Even after having successfully fitted myself into these spaces, I then have to find a way to not only manipulate tools and nuts, washers and bolts, but also be able to see while doing it.  Sometimes this involves recreating Twister games played in younger days.  With my advancing years, Twister is a game best left to the memory bank.  Unfortunately, toilet repair does not respect age.

Seeing that there was an annoying leak, I purchased at the local Home Depot a toilet repair kit, assured by the salesman that it would do the trick.  Relying on mechanically gifted people is one of my Achilless heels since the other Achilles heel is that I'm as bereft of mechanical skill and experience as I am cyberchallenged with computers.  Had mankind been relying on me for advancements, we'd still be waiting for the wheel.

I took the thing home and almost painlessly replaced the fill valve.  Imagine then my consternation when I heard the siphoning of water in an invisible yet still ascertainable location around the toilet.  Given my tenuous grasp of the obvious, since I saw no water on the bathroom floor (Karen should be smiling with that one...) I deduced that there was still a problem with the toilet. 

Looking for help on the internet was fruitless because I haven't discerned the logic to asking for the right videos.  For me, it's as arcane a science as looking for something in the yellow pages (need an attorney?  Look up lawyer.)  Somehow, I found out that food coloring would do the trick to trace the source of the leak.  To my chagrin, it showed that the leak was somewhere in the fill tube area.

This is what leads us to a liberal arts education.  The leading toilet repair kit -- as recommended to us by  Robert, patron saint of all incompetent wannabe home repair persons and one who taught Job patience -- was by luck the one I had bought.  Apparently Fluidmaster believes in osmotic transmission of instructions, because the only graphics included in the package were these:

INSTALL WITH CONFIDENCE

1.  Set Height

     Defina la altura

2.  Install

     Instale

3.  Connect

     Conecte

4.  Adjust

     Regule

Along with these incisive instructions are pictures that show a still shot of one second of the process described by the instruction.  If nothing else, making sure to include NAFTA-friendly instructions in correct Spanish (a pet peeve of mind) was nice but equally unhelpful.

The rest of the page includes the usual legalize and self-promotion one might expect to find on packaging.  But there isn't one other scrap of instruction in the frigging paperwork to help never-will-be-Bob-Vilas like me how to overcome problems that might occur.

And this, boys and girls, is the fault of our education system.  By focusing so much attention on the math and science portion side of our children's brains, we've created a society that couldn't communicate if it's life -- or toilet repair -- depended on it.

Faced with this, I repaired to the local Home Depot for some assistance, since I found that I couldn't get the plastic nut holding the existing fill tube in the toilet tank.  The otherwise helpful Home Depot associate suggested to me that in lieu of an oil filter wrench (who knew there was such a thing?), a strap wrench would do the trick.  None the wiser, I purchased the relatively inexpensive tool and trundled home confident that I would be able to get the thing off.

Forty-five frustrating minutes later, I called Home Depot up and asked for a better suggestion, since this wasn't cutting it.  Coincidentally, they suggested using a hacksaw and a pliers.  Not being able to find the hacksaw, I tried several other cutting implements without success.  Fit to be tied and with the cover of night to hide my shame, I loaded the toilet tank in the car, threw in the worthless strap wrench and returned to Home Depot for my third visit of the day. 

The associates I found were as perplexed as I was that a strap wrench had been suggested.  They took pity on me and without asking took out a hacksaw, cut off the obstinate plastic hex nut and removed the assembly from my doleful toilet tank.  They then told me that to install the replacement fill tube, I'd need a channellock wrench. 

Really?

That was funny, because nowhere on the repair kit does it tell me that when I confidentally installed the kit, I'd need a frigging channellock wrench!  Unhelpfully, it showed me the fill valve, the fill tube, the flapper, six rubber washers, six metal washers and six nuts but mysteriously left out the three bolts they included in the package.  It was as if I'd been sold a corporate team-building kit purposely without the instructions so my new coworkers and I could break the ice and not each other's noggins as we tried to figure out how to use this thing.

It is perhaps an unfair surmise that if the people at Fluidmaster had had a liberal arts education, they might have known that they had to direct their instructions at the least common denominator, or those of us who are devoid of any mechanical know-how whatsoever.  They might have known from writing term papers to double-check things like spelling, punctuation, grammar and what not to make sure that little details weren't left out.  Above all, they might have learned to communicate, an art form that is slowly but surely going the way of the eight track tape, the rotary telephone and common courtesy.

I could write a pithy letter of complaint to Fluidmaster, but it would be for naught.  In the first place, it wouldn't help me get the toilet repaired.  And since already I've wasted more hours than I'd like to admit on this simple project, I don't want to take up any more time lecturing people who would only turn a blind eye to my complaint.

Moreover, and more importantly, I'm not sure there'd be anyone there who would be able to understand what I wrote.

(c) 2012 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles