When you metaphorically (and literally) spill several gallons of water
Sometimes the process of personal evolution does not flow in a clear direction – in the same way that water might, for example, cascade down a staircase.
I am not a plumber, and I am even less of an expert on drains. In no way, shape or form am I handy.
If you know me at all, you probably know that already. Even if you don’t know me, you might guess that about 30 seconds after meeting me.
All of this is just fine.
I’m a person who generally knows my limitations and knows myself. I am also someone who is interested in evolving as a person – in understanding what I like about myself but also the things I would like to work on, what I would like to learn.
But here’s the thing: Sometimes even when you know yourself, you forget. And sometimes the process of evolution does not flow in a straight line.
Like, for example, water cascading down a staircase.
You can only hope to clean things up and learn from them. Sometimes that means remembering yourself and sometimes that means remembering what you thought you had already learned.
Let’s back up a little.
The main floor drain in our unfinished basement started to collect pools of water earlier this week. It would happen when someone took a shower. It would happen when we ran the dishwasher. It would happen when we used the washing machine.
It wasn’t an emergency. The water wasn’t really spreading further than a three-foot radius around the drain, and eventually it would flow back down.
We have a trusted guy who has helped us with household projects for almost 20 years. I was planning to see if he could come to the house soon anyway to look at a couple lingering problems that were beyond my limited scope.
I texted him and made arrangements for him to come by in a few days, though I didn’t specifically mention the floor drain.
In the meantime, I went downstairs to inspect the drain myself. This is the part where the story starts to take a turn – where I should reiterate the part about not being an expert in drains, plumbing or anything of the sort.
There was a decent-sized pool of water from running the dishwasher, so I got out our old Shop-Vac and decided it would be a good idea to suck it up. Sure, it would go down by itself at some point. But there was the potential it could spread if more water came down the drain and couldn’t get out.
The Shop-Vac did its job, and in the process of sucking up the water it gulped up something that sounded larger and heavy. I lugged the heavy, water-laden equipment up the stairs, then dumped the water in a corner of our backyard.
I retrieved the object, which looked like a plug of some sort: a rubber stopper on one end and a wingnut on the other. I had no idea where it came from or what it was for, so naturally I consulted … social media?
Social media.
Within minutes, I had an answer: That’s a plug that goes in the side of the main drain, and you can pop it off to clean the drain (this is correct). Mine was already out before I started the Shop-Vac, and (presumably) floating in the drain itself before I sucked it up.
I had gained a tiny bit of knowledge. The smallest amount possible. I was still not a plumbing expert. I wasn’t even a plumbing novice.
But I was about to become another self-inflicted example of the perils of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. What is that, you might ask? Wikipedia has a pretty good summary:
“A cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.”
The particularly galling thing is that I had been reading, while all this was happening, about this very bias in Adam Grant’s book, “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know.”
Yet here I was, about to form a magical theory based on practically no information (but just enough to make me dangerous): This plug had come loose and was, in fact, the thing that was causing the backup. Once I sucked it out of the trap and put it back its home on the side of the drain, all would be well.
I might not even have to bother our handyman with this because I – heretofore a man who was not handy at all – was suddenly handy.
Or, as I would soon find out, I had merely invented a convenient solution that wasn’t a solution at all.
I ran a test with a little bit of water. It seemed to go down just fine. Problem solved? I boasted to my wife that I might have just fixed this thing.
Nope. With more water, the same drain problem kept happening. In fact, maybe it was getting a little worse? I made a couple trips up and down with the Shop-Vac after showers. It was just water, but I couldn’t admit that the drain was really clogged – nor could I sit around and let it flow back naturally.
The next night, our kids took showers while my wife did dishes. I fretted about how much water might back up. I was watching the drain from the top of the steps. My wife, unaware but starting to sense that in my mind this was turning from an inconvenience to a more urgent situation, asked me if we needed to call the company we had used several years ago to resolve a similar problem.
No, no, I assured her. It could wait for our handyman. And I could handle things in the meantime. I sneaked away to very inconspicuously run a very loud appliance again.
The water was spreading. Again, just water and not terribly dangerous because it’s an unfinished basement, It was getting late at this point, past 10 p.m., and our kids were settling down and ready for their bedtime routine.
I’ll be right there, I told them.
Just have to semi-secretly haul more water out into the freezing night, accomplishing nothing but forestalling the inevitable.
I filled the Shop-Vac as high as it would allow. It felt a little heavier than usual. I was halfway up the stairs. And then …
The lid, which for some reason I was holding as a way to carry this monster up the stairs, popped off. The whole thing tumbled out of my hands. The Shop-Vac went crashing down the hard steps, spilling many gallons of water back onto the floor but in in a far less organized way.
My wife came dashing over, afraid that my anguished shouts of “Oh no! Oh God!” were in fact because I was falling down the stairs instead of just a piece of equipment and a bunch of water.
I was panting at that point. “I dropped it down the stairs. It spilled everywhere,” I said.
She was relieved. And then she was (correctly) upset.
She gently but directly told me that it seemed like I was not keeping her in the loop as to how much water was backing up. (Guilty). I feebly told her that I had texted our handyman to see if he could come the next morning instead of two days from then.
She ushered all three kids into one bedroom to read stories, to restore some semblance of normalcy to a complete cluster of a situation and to calm down our very worried 9-year-old daughter.
I found our push broom in the garage and headed to the basement to assess the damage – retracing my steps both literally and figuratively to figure out just how things had reached this point.
First, it meant putting a Shop-Vac back together (relatively easy), pushing all the water back toward the drain (surprisingly easy), sucking it up again to send it outside for what turned out to be the last time so that I could have peace of mind, walking into the bedroom and saying, “I’m sorry.”
Second, it meant unpacking exactly why I had seemingly unlearned things about myself.
I have a hard time when things are unsettled. I like to be in control. And I have a habit of taking on stress to spare others the same feeling, sometimes to my own detriment (and/or to the detriment of solving a problem more effectively).
I can ignore non-emergencies and compartmentalize them while going on with my life. But once I decide that a problem has reached the point that it needs attention and I set a solution in motion I have a hard time A) accepting setbacks and B) waiting for the process to play out and for the resolution to take hold.
I have operated in this mode for a lot of my life, but in the past year or so I’ve actively been trying not to. I’ve been asking for help more. Communicating better. Understanding my discomfort and trying to loosen its grip.
And then this.
Did I regress because of a particularly stressful week? Not enough sleep? Maybe. But that circumstance is also precisely the time I should be doing all the things I didn’t do. Help. Communication. Letting go.
I gave myself a tiny bit of grace and fell asleep. The next morning our handyman texted back. The main drain? That’s not something he could handle. We would need to call an expert for that.
So I did. They came out hours later. The problem shockingly (not shockingly) was fixed, just as it had been several years ago. All it took was someone with actual knowhow and equipment. An expert in dealing with the problem, not someone with a Shop-Vac, a theory and a heap of dangerously unearned confidence.
All of this could have taken place at least 24 hours and one Shop-Vac incident earlier, but maybe it had to happen this way?
As the expert finished the major labor of the job, he mentioned that the trap in the drain also needed to be cleaned out. He could tell, at least as I recall it, because everything drained just fine when the plug that goes in the side of the drain was removed but started to back up when it was back in place.
It was easy enough to do, he said, but he didn’t have the tool. I told him our handyman was coming tomorrow, and I knew he could handle that and then put the plug back in (which he did).
For the time being, we just left the plug out. But after he left, I did have to stare at it a bit and think.
The solution I had invented wasn’t just not a solution, it temporarily but certainly made the problem worse.
Hopefully, I relearned my lesson.
This took me back to our Nokomis house. The previous owners (i.e., the contracting company of Dunning-Kruger) had screwed up putting in a clearly DIY basement bathroom, and sewage gas and/or sewage water would often come out of the shower drain until we got it (not inexpensively) fixed. I also lived in constant fear of water coming into the basement when it rained hard. That feeling of helplessness/lack of control was tough to shake.
Is there a connection between sports writing and ineptitude around home repair tasks? See Pat Reusse, Judd Zulgad. If so, I probably should have been a sports writer. I can change a smoke alarm battery, but do get ideas about little projects, end up on YouTube, then find out it's harder than it looks.