Part 1: Tape Really Can Fix Anything
Monday evening I had a meeting after work with a guy. I scheduled it for that time because Reyna has a lesson after work, so she gets home late too. After chatting with my guy for about an hour about this and that, I texted Reyna to see if she was home yet. Her response was something along the lines of, "Yes I'm cleaning up our flooded kitchen." I'd been home before my meeting and the kitchen was normal looking, albeit for a few dirty dishes in the sink left over from the night before.
When I got home half the dishes were done and the drain pipe had separated from the pipe that attaches to the sink. This is not the first episode of this occurrence. This is due to the fact that the non-sink pipe is held in place by the friction of a few wraps of electrical tape around the sink pipe. The larger pipe that drains the water out of the house slips onto the electrical tape. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that a large volume of water rushing down the sink drain can and will at times dislodge the larger drain pipe.
After a long day of work, Reyna was sufficiently frustrated by the situation and left me to coordinate the sink fixing with our landlord neighbor. A friend of ours has a saying that I completely agree with. It goes like this: "Vietnamese people are brilliant at fixing things so they last for a week before breaking again." Things last just long enough for you to not blame the current breakdown on the craftsmanship of the last mechanic, handy-man etc. So I walked next door to get the landlord.
Ngo, our landlord, is in his sixties. I don't actually know how old he is, and he doesn't look to be a day over 52, but I do know he flew helicopters for the Americans during the Vietnam Conflict. So that has to put him older than 50s. He also has two grown kids. One lives with him, the other is married and lives with her husband in Nepal of all places (and we though Vietnam was outrageously foreign -yeesh).
I figured fixing the sink would require a trip to the hardware store. Nope. He ran over, looked at the "leak," zipped back over to his house and returned with a roll of electrical tape. He had the sink working again in less than ten minutes. Here he is in action:
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| I challenge any American over the age of 60 to adopt this position. I'm only half that age and I can't do it (curse you torn ACL! You're really getting in the way of my yoga). Note the fix-all roll of tape next to him. I like that he is wearing the same outfit my father wears to bed while he fixes our kitchen sink. |
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| The finished product. You really have to click and enlarge this one to get the full effect. Since the roll of tape alone failed after five months, we now have the wire safety. I intend to monitor the effectiveness of the wire safety in the coming months. Stay tuned crime stoppers. |
You may have also noticed that there is no tape showing on the outside of the pipes. That would be sensible. The tape is wrapped around the sink pipe and the drain pipe sleeves over it. It's a friction fit. He had to adjust the amount of tape two or three times before he achieved the ideal compression.
Problem solved.
I was reminded of a time when I visited my brother and helped him finish remodeling his master bathroom. There were three of us. My bro, me and his neighbor, an older gentleman who worked as an electrical contractor up until he retired to my brother's gated community. While we were working the neighbor accidentally started cut into the drain pipe for the bath tub. Later that week, we had the whole bathroom finished and ready for operation except for the pipe. We couldn't think of a way to access the pipe to fix it. There simply wasn't enough room. So I took some rubberized plumbing sticky tape and wrapped the nick about 40 times. We then patched the hole in the kitchen ceiling, and my brother moved down the street about six months later. I've occasionally wondered about the state of that pipe in the eight years since I "fixed the leak."
Part 2: Attack!
On Wednesday I had to travel to my weekly out of town meeting. I followed my usual travel-to-small-town-where-there-is-no-vegetarian-food protocol by stopping at the bakery on the way out of town to stock up on bread. It's not the healthiest thing to eat all day, but it keeps me from getting hungry and comes with the added benefit of making it possible to work through lunch. I got two croissants and a loaf of freshly baked ciabatta bread. I ate the croissants on the three hour car ride to the meeting and put the rest in my bag. I then crossed the street to the An Phu Supermarket and bought a big bottle of water and a bag of cheddar cheese Goldfish*.
*Cheddar cheese Goldfish are one of my absolute favorite foods. It's safe to say that goldfish crackers were the cornerstone of my diet for about four years between finishing college and getting a job that paid more than $250 per week. My personal record is that I've eaten an entire gallon-sized carton of goldfish in less than 24 hours. I can put them down.
I arrived at the site of the meeting three hours later. It started as I walked in, so I got out my laptop and set my bag against the wall of the conference room. It was a long meeting, and the majority of topics did not concern me. I spent most of the time reading and responding to email and looking at ESPN.com or Grantland.com (two ultimate work time-wasters)*. Occasionally my area would come up and my opinions would be roundly ignored or I'd get yelled at. It's the nature of the beast, I suppose. At about the two hour mark, I decided I needed to take some notes. Since I always have my iPad at work, I prefer to take notes on that, but it was still in my bag.
*Why was I farting around on the Internets rather than posting in my blog you ask? I'll tell you. One time I wrote a blog entry out by hand while I was in the same meeting. When we got back to the office the next day, two people asked me independently what I was working on during the meeting. Almost no one I work with knows this blog exists, so I made up some story about chronicling this or that. Since then I've been gun shy about blogging during meetings. People tend to notice when you write non-stop for an hour. It's not typical "email behavior." I prefer to fly under the radar.
I turned to open my bag and was met with a swarm of about 50,000 ants. They immediately moved onto me as I sat in silent shock. I managed to brush them all off, close the bag and return my attention to the meeting. As the participants droned on and on, I kept turning around to survey the damage. There were ants EVERYWHERE.
You know that feeling when you feel a little tingle, and the tingle is confirmed when you find a little critter crawling on you; then for the next ten minutes you feel invisible critters on you? I was suffering from that very issue while sitting in a big and important meeting. People must have thought I was battling a sudden onset of Turret's as I brushed and scratched. I'm already the badly dressed TatVeg in the group, so I suppose there is very little behaviorally they'll put past me, but it was still embarrassing.
Finally we got to the last page of the meeting agenda. I scanned through it for anything I might be needed to comment on and found that I was finished. I grabbed my ant-ridden bag, holding it at arms length and carried it out of the room. It took me 15 minutes of shaking and stomping to rid the bag of ants. Even after I got back inside, I was still finding them on the bag and me for the next two hours.
I have no idea where they came from. I like to think that I would notice ants on my food while I'm eating it.* So I'm pretty sure that there weren't any ants on the two croissants I ate earlier that morning. But still it's amazing to me that I can sit indoors and go from an bag ant population of zero to 10,000 in less than two hours. How is that possible if they're not there to begin with? I've kept a watchful eye on that bag ever since. I didn't even bring it with me to the office today because I don't want the ants attacking me while I'm driving.
*Reyna will kill me for telling this story, but one weekend in our old apartment we bought a bag of Hint of Lime Tostitos. That sort of thing is a big treat, since a medium sized bag costs around $5. "Do not let me eat this entire bag" she instructed as she tore it open. She ate some chips as we chatted and I took them away from her, curled the bag top and put them in the cabinet. Fast forward to the following weekend. We were getting read to watch a movie and Reyna said she wanted something to snack on. She went in the cabinet and found the forgotten bag of HoL Tostitos. She whooped, skipped back with her bag of chips and sat down next to me on the bed. She opened the bag as the movie started, so her attention was on my laptop. I heard her chomp down on the first chip. A beat. Then she screamed, jumped up and ran to the bathroom coughing and gasping. She'd just eaten an ant laden Tostito. And when I say "ant laden" I mean the surface of the chip was alive with ants. The bag was almost nothing but ants. I ended up throwing away about 80% of the food in our cabinet because ants had gotten into just about everything. This story came up while I was telling her about my bread infestation from this week and she confided in me that HoL Tostitos are not the same since the incident.
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