In Hot Water Again (Thank God)
Procrastination, thy name is Al.
I’ve been told by friends that I should not tell this story. However, if I am going to be honest in this blog, I have to write about something that puts me in a bad light.
To be fair, most of the things I write puts me in a bad light.
So, here I go:
My hot water heater broke, and I went without hot water for a while.
There, I said it.
How long you may ask?
I’ll answer that question with this.
Thom, a friend of mine, read the book Band of Brothers and in there tells a story how Easy Company, during World War II, could not find enough hot water to shower for months at a time.
“So, basically,” Thom said, “Easy Company had more hot water in their helmets than Al had in his entire house.”
I live alone, and have not dated anyone in a while.
I can guarantee that if I had been dating, a new hot water heater would have been installed the very next day.
But I wasn’t dating.
A new water heater costs well over two thousand dollars to install.
But, did I really need one?
Turns out, I can wash dishes with cold water.
I can wash clothes with cold water.
I can even (God forgive me) take showers with cold water.
This went on far longer than I would like to admit.
A few months ago I planned to have my kitchen redone. While I was at it, thought I’d have the water heater replaced at the same time. I pulled enough money from savings to “settle all family business” (Godfather reference. I wasn’t killing crime bosses, just two birds with one stone).
I needed a plumber.
On one of the other trivia teams trivia night (Wednesday at a bar in Whitehouse, NJ) was a man that owned a plumbing and heating company (Carmen). I spoke to him and set up a day for the work to be done.
His employees were extremely professional.
Got a text one morning (they were outside my house) and in less than an hour old water heater gone, new water heater installed, and at long last, hot showers awaited.
As luck would have it, the day the heater was installed it was also trivia night.
So when I walked into the bar, Carmen asked me how it felt to take a hot shower again.
“Let me tell you a story,” I said to his team.
In 2003 I was in the hospital for almost two weeks (blood clot to my eye). For most of that time I was attached to machines and IV bottles, and could only go as far from my bed as the bathroom to my left.
That meant no showers.
After ten days, I begged a nurse to let me take a shower. After some discussion, I was untethered from my bed, I was led into the hallway and to a door near the nurses’ station.
Inside was a room.
Actually, it was a shower the size of a room.
I turned on the water, made it as hot as I could stand, and ten days of my hospital stay washed away down the drain.
“And that,” I told the Carmen and his team, “was the greatest shower I ever took.”
Then added, “the one I took this afternoon comes in a very close second.”
I hope I learned my lesson, that when something breaks, I’ll get it fixed right away…
...or at least until I get a date.
