Season-Delayed Home Improvement. I think every coach's wife in the world can identify with me on this little gem. I haven't yet decided if it is intentional on the part of our husbands, or if it is just part of their male nature. Either way, it is the most infuriating habit he possesses, right behind not putting the seat down and that ridiculous one-nostril-plugged nose-blowing thing he does to discharge nasal blockages.
What is it that bothers me so? Well it doesn't have a catchy name. And it is difficult to explain. But it always commences about 1 week prior to the first football practice in August. Mr. Coach suddenly believes he is Mr. Home Depot and tears into something like a shower door or faucet. He completely rips out a bathroom floor. He short-circuits a one of the burners on my stove. The front door is taped on with duct tape and baling wire. (All true stories, by the way.) And just when the project is at the point of no return, he tapes it off with caution tape, traffic cones and cattle fencing and says something like, "Don't use this until I fix it, OK?" And, in the past, I have thought, "Hey, cool. No problem. He'll get to it in the next week or so. I am sure he realizes that we need to eat and shower and rid ourselves of bodily waste and exit our home on a regular basis! There is no frigging way he'll just leave this until the season ends in mid-November!"
Guess what?
No, really.
I'll give you one guess.
HE LEAVES IT UNTIL MID-NOVEMBER!!! Always!
So, as a mother and a human that needs to use the bathroom occasionally, I take matters into my own hands. The hands are dirty, of course, because I have no faucet with which to shower. I'll give you a hypothetical situation. If this should at all resemble any real-life occurrences, it is strictly coincidental. Strictly.
Hypothetically speaking, let us just assume that a shower faucet in my master bathroom was ripped apart and assessed as being non-functional about August 12th. And let's just say Mr. Coach put it back together in a jiggly, half-screwed-in kind of way and said, "Don't touch this."
And then we should hypothetically wait. And wait some more. And shower elsewhere in the house for a while.
Now it is hypothetically mid-October. And I really want to shower in my shower. Call me a hygiene freak. So I hypothetically approach Mr. Coach and ask him, in that sweet, cooing, wifely way, "When the hell is the faucet being looked at again? I just need a rough estimate. Will it be 2013-ish? Is it before the next sighting of Haley's Comet? Just generalize." And he hypothetically tells me that if I want it done during the arduous time we call Football Season, I can do it myself.
You got it, dude. Consider it done.
Then, I might (if this was a real story) go to the Home Depot with the broken parts, explain my problem to a worker there, buy a brand new faucet (even after the worker told me to call a plumber), take the entire faucet apart, put the new faucet on and try to turn it on. But it doesn't turn on. So, I pack up the new faucet, return it and call a plumber.
Then, this fake plumber in this fake story comes and fixes my fake broken faucet. And I am hypothetically over joyed. The problem has been fixed.
The problems have just begun.
The hypothetical bill arrives from the plumber. And this is when Mr. Home Depot/Coach/Absentee Handyman decides he's going to re-insert himself into this narrative. Now is the time he hypothetically questions my choice of plumber. Wants the blow-by-blow of my conversation at the hardware store. He may have even (if this were a real story) asked that I show him the number in the phone book that I called because he didn't believe me.
Here ends our highly pathetic, hypothetical story. Hopefully it paints a vivid picture of Season-Delayed Home Improvement for you. And I hope it gives you a sense of awe and respect for the self-control coaches' wives exhibit every day of the season, as they resist the urge to buffet their spouses' heads with a faucet wrench....
Hypothetically, of course.
No comments:
Post a Comment