Splosh

[tigerfort]

Oh good; the washer in the cold tap has just split. It's one in the morning and (naturally) I don't have a spare in the house - even if I'm physically able to dismantle the tap, which isn't a given. Since this house doesn't have a cold-water tank, not only can I not use the cold taps, I can't use anything else that requires water either - if I want to go to the loo, I'm going to need to remember to go to the kitchen first to turn the water back on so that I can flush.

On the plus side, the babblingly superstitious part of my brain has accepted this as October's disaster (there was one in June, and one in August, and everyone knows such things come in threes, so clearly there needed to be an October one to complete the alternate-months pattern) and has therefore stopped spraying existential dread over the rest of me, which is quite relaxing. Relatively speaking. Nonetheless, aargh.

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

This suggests a spectacular washer-disintegrates-at-once moment, rather than the slow decay to which I am accustomed...

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

It went from slightly-awkward-to-turn-off-properly (ie slightly drippy unless you were careful) to full-on unstoppable gushing flow in a single moment. I suspect "disintegrated" is slightly overdoing it, but I was surprised the change wasn't more gradual, yes.

[colinbj.livejournal.com]

Washer disintegration caused the Challenger disaster, when leaking high temperature gas caused a Space Shuttle to blow up in 1986, killing all aboard. That's the only other washer disintegration disaster I remember reading about.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

And I don't even get Richard Feynman to come and talk to me about it, which would be some consolation. (Disaster is perhaps a bit strong, but if my chimp-brain is willing to accept this, I'm fine with that. Neither June's RTA or August's incident - which I've not posted about yet, though I keep meaning to - involved a washer.)

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

In similar circumstances (toilet cistern though, rather than tap), I once fashioned a washer out of an old bike inner-tube with a pair of scissors. As far as I know it's still functioning several years later (unless damerell has replaced it).