No Good Deed

If trouble comes in threes, I guess I'm done. But if water-related trouble has a different set of rules, I'd better look out. If that's the case, maybe I'll keep out of the deep end of the pool for a while....

There we were in my car, driving to a car wash to get, well, a car wash. That's not something I do nearly as often as I should, but I'll be honest -- working at home means I don't do a lot of driving, and it rains here so much, that, well, car washes seem impractical. But my car was really dirty.

In the car, Sue and I were both very sleepy. The previous night, we'd been awoken at 2:30 in the morning by what had to have been a burglar...

Well, at least it was a loud banging noise. It was not a "house settling" kind of noise or a "car backfiring" noise. This was a furious, rapid BANGBANGBANG kind of noise -- not something we get routinely at 2:30 in the morning in Seattle suburbia. I gotta tell you, when I am first waking up, I'm not good for much. And when I'm startled awake, I don't think so clearly. So, when I heard this noise, I was convinced -- absolutely convinced -- that someone was breaking into the house. I told Sue later that if I had been left to my own devices, I would have rolled across the bed and dialed 911 on the phone. Seriously.

Instead, since I was not left to my own devices and Sue was there, I said something helpful like, "What was that?" This roused her and made her immediately think something had happened to the dog. (Yes, we got a new dog. Yes we're paranoid of bad things happening to her because of what happened to Rufus. I'll tell you more about her sometime soon.) So she ran out of the room and downstairs. Fortunately, the gang of burglars my sleep-addled mind had conjured were already fading, and I realized where I had heard that sound before in our house.

The washing machine. We have an ancient washing machine, which isn't really like us. We have all new appliances in the kitchen, a new TV and components, and heaven knows we get new computers at a foolishly rapid rate. Maybe we're hard on stuff, I dunno. More likely, we're just typically spoiled representatives of our generation. I suppose I'm kind of a "so what if it's not broke, let's fix it anyway," kind of guy (or, more appropriately a "but this new shiny thing is so cool" kind of guy). There are few major appliances/furnishings/whatnot in our house that're more than a couple of years old.

But behind two big closet doors in a little room off the kitchen are our ancient washer and dryer. When you turn on the washer, a small mammoth's head pokes out of the top and sprays water on the clothes from its trunk and scrubs them for us, which is nice because otherwise we'd never have the time to have Barney and Betty over to grill brontoburgers. Okay, maybe not. But it's old. And sometimes when the load in the machine gets unbalanced, it makes a BANGBANGBANG noise that we never hear at 2:30 in the morning, hence it could easily be mistaken for an entire gang of thieves. But we were indeed using the washer late that night, because of the tipped-over fountain...

Earlier that evening, Sue and I were getting into a file cabinet in our office to get something out of it. Now, this two-drawer cabinet (did I mention it was a new file cabinet?) was designed so that you can't open both drawers at once, because it would get front-heavy and tip over. But that's just annoying, so I had disabled that, master handyman and forward thinker that I am.

So of course Sue and I opened both the drawers at once and the whole thing began to tip forward. Which really should not have been a big deal (it's a small cabinet, and if the bottom drawer is open, it can only tip forward a bit). Except that for Christmas this year Sue got me one of those little fountains that you plug in and has water splash over little rocks and makes a soothing sound. It's nice. But it's full of a surprising amount of water and sits atop the new two-drawer file cabinet.

Both drawers open, forward goes the cabinet, and whoosh goes the fountain, tipped on its side and sliding toward Sue -- into the file cabinet full of files.

It took a fair bit of time and a whole lot of towels, but we got the mess cleaned up. Not a really big deal and far fewer important files were damaged than we had feared. So I took the big armful of towels and put them in the washer before going to bed...

Which brings us back to 2:30 that night. Investigating the noise, and tipped by the similarity between the washer's unbalanced noise and what I had presumed to be an entire brigade of terrorists, I checked the washing machine, and sure enough, it was making a strange gurgling sound. There were similar water-running sounds coming from where the main water line enters the house, where the shut-off valve is. My still-sleepy mind immediately thought terrible thoughts involving a broken water main, huge plumbing bills, and visions of water gushing out of a pipe somewhere. So I fearfully went down into the crawlspace under the house. Nope. All dry.

Then I figured the washer'd gone kablooey, so I shut off the water to it, using the little valves where it connects to the wall. No more gurgling sounds. No more water-running sounds coming from the pipes near the main valve. That must have been it. Sue went back to bed, and I followed. But first, I figured I could use a glass of water. I went to the tap in the bathroom, and -- there's no water. Just a snaky hissing sound.

I went to check a few other faucets. No water anywhere. Now I was convinced that we're hemorrhaging water into the yard or the inside of a wall or something awful. I went outside with a flashlight but saw no dikes bursting, no broken pipes spewing. Sue called the water utility people, and we soon learned that somewhere in the neighborhood someone else's pipes had burst, forcing them to shut off the water on our street. I finally figured out that the lack of water to the washing machine had probably unbalanced it to create the banging noise, not the army of Nazi stormtroopers that I had thought. Thanks to the washing machine trying to draw water for a couple of hours and me turning on a lot of faucets, we had a lot of air in our pipes, but that was no major catastrophe. We'd lost an hour and a half of sleep, but everything's okay. Except that the next day, we were very sleepy...

Sue and I are on the way to the car wash. Sue has already made a joke about all the bad luck we've had with water in the last 24 hours, but we don't see the connection to the car wash. Yet.

On the road to the car wash, a woman's car had stalled in the middle of the street, almost into an intersection. We stopped to help, and she said she needed a jump start. This was a very busy road, and traffic was already backed up because of her, so there was no way I was going to try to jump-start her car there. I told her, "We have to get your car off the road." I got out of my car, and Sue slides over into the driver's seat.

Much to my horror, the woman started pushing and steering her car even before I could get out of mine. I say "much to my horror" because in her pushing, she was making a left turn in front of oncoming traffic, through a red light. By the time I got to her, she was already in the intersection. There was no stopping her now. So I grabbed hold and pushed with everything I had to get this car out of the intersection as fast as possible. We got through and to the side of a less busy cross-street. Sue managed to get our car over there and we jump-started the lady's car. The whole thing took three or four minutes, tops, and then we're back on the road to the car wash, feeling good because we'd done something nice.

It wasn't until after the car wash, and a trip to the post office, and a stop to get a big old fountain drink of Diet Coke and a little caffeine-injected chocolate candy appropriately called Star Buzzer's Rocket Chocolate (I don't recommend them), that we got home. I took off my sunglasses and reached for my regular glasses.

They weren't there. I normally put them in my car visor or my shirt pocket while I wear the sunglasses. And then I saw it all come together with a sense of terrible, water-logged dread. There was only one place they could be.

We started up the car again and drove back to the intersection on the road to the car wash. The one where I'd leaned forward to push the lady's car with all my might to keep it and her and me from getting smacked by oncoming traffic. Leaned way forward, like a toppling cabinet with a fountain on it that makes a mess requiring a load of towels in a washing machine with no water halfway through its cycle. On the way to the car wash. Water damage one, two, and now three times.

The flattened remnants of my glasses lay in the busy intersection, hardly recognizable as what they once were. Road-kill glasses. The people at the eye doctor's office said they were the most mangled glasses they'd ever seen, in fact.

So now I have to wear my old, dorky glasses with a three-year-old prescription that strains my eyes (strangely enough, my eyes are getting better as I get older). Stopping to help the lady with the crappy car battery is going to cost me about 180 bucks. Not that I'm complaining. I still think it was the right thing to do. If I had to do it again, I would (but I'd put my glasses away first, of course). I keep thinking, though, that the woman we helped has no idea I lost my glasses helping her. While I'm sure she appreciated us helping her, it was not that big of a deal. She'll probably have forgotten the incident in a less time than it takes my new glasses to come in.

I guess if there's an actual moral to the story, beyond "no good deed goes unpunished" -- which, while humorously appropriate in this context, isn't really a philosophy I hold to -- it's this: How many times has each person in the world done something that has an effect on someone else (for good or for ill) that's far larger than the person ever knows? How many people have I, like the crappy-car-battery lady, caused trouble for without ever knowing it? It's a little humbling to think that I've been someone else's crappy-car-battery lady in my life, but I probably have. We all probably have.

Or maybe the moral is that trouble really does come in threes. Or that water is not my friend. It could be worse, I suppose. I imagine fire troubles are worse than water troubles. In any event, I've got to end this so I can go downstairs and lock the doors to keep the innumerable hordes of barbarians from getting in.