Cursed

Everyone has something that plagues them. Whether it's bad luck at poker, bad luck in relationships, or the actual plague, there's something that pretty much everyone can encounter and gripe "this Always happens to me!" Some consider this phenomenon one's curse, an individual burden placed upon the shoulders of each person at birth that they will continue to endure until they find a way to defeat it. Maybe there is a way for all of us.

My personal curse has one name but many faces. Plumbing. No matter what, no matter where I am, the pipes suck. It never seems to be my fault--the clog in the toilet has been building up, the water heater was already on its way out, the leaky hole in the ceiling is a known problem, the mold has been growing for years, the last resident just took showers without water pressure--but somehow thanks to my lucky timing I wind up having to deal with the faulty plumbing.
I arrive on the scene and instantly the quietly nagging problem explodes. sometimes literally.

I feel I should mention that I have been effectively using a plunger since I was 5 years old. I've known how to re-light a pilot since i was 7. I have fixed so many different varieties of flushing mechanism I'm amazed the wheel hasn't been re-invented. I've honed my "toilet overflow" senses to a fine point and have water-shutoff reflexes like a ninja. I've been hit numerous times with clots of rust-colored water and have scrubbed myself like a cast-iron pot after manually digging out particularly unappetizing blockages.

I have taken so many cold showers I could cry.

The annoying thing is, I do not have a "Can-do" attitude. I tend to evaluate most problems from the perspective of "is it my fault? is it my problem? can anyone else take care of it?" before moving to handle them. It's amazing, though, how few people know how to do those simple stupid things that I wind up doing--in hotel rooms in Paris at 4am, in the haunted cellar at midnight, after the hired plumbers have come and gone--all standing nearby, helplessly watching, asking what things are.

When I arrived on Taney, the water heater was broken. It was soon repaired, however, and pleasant enough showers ensued. Then the temperature became intermittent. Now the drain, which worked fine yesterday, is backed up like I-95 on a friday afternoon, so i took my shower standing in a lake. I can only imagine that soon enough the knobs will fall off in my hands and it will start pouring blood. And i'll probably fix it.