“I’ve never heard anyone use that term before in all the time I’ve worked here.”

Uh oh. I’d identified the man in the orange apron – the one I’d spied halfway down the hardware aisle – as my last, best hope of fixing my leaking bath-tub faucet and stop the dripping in the kitchen below. But now it seemed the whole plan was going to fail. I had known this was going to be a problem – you can’t go asking for a tool at a hardware store without knowing the name of the tool you’re asking for – but I figured if I made up something decent-sounding and said it in a foreign accent, I’d be alright. I thought maybe he’d just brush it off; different measuring systems, different names for tools.

“Uh, you know,” I said in my best fake-English accent. “A flat-faced monkey-wrench. It’s like one of those monkey wrenches … with a flat face. No teeth.”

But something was wrong. Maybe the accent wasn’t thick enough. Maybe he’d lived in England. Either way, he didn’t look like he was buying it, and he looked at me with an expression of disbelief that made me feel like grabbing a nearby door-handle and stabbing myself with it. When it comes to tools (and sports and cars), I’m a complete idiot. Usually I can fake my way through any challenges that come along, but today had not been my day, and now this man was standing with his arms on his hips and one eyebrow raised.

It had started four hours earlier. I was lying upside down on the kitchen counter-top, my head wedged beneath the cabinets, my feet dangling off in space. In my hands was a cordless power drill, which I was using to install a paper-towel holder from Ikea. This was my fourth try.

Ikea, warehouse of wonders that it is, has one shortcoming: everything you buy there has some assembly required. The paper-towel holder had a lot more of it than I expected. The main problem was that you had to drill the backing clips into the wall, but screws weren’t included. I don’t have a great assortment of them lying around, so I had to scrounge up a few that looked close (again, trying to fake my way through home improvement). But they weren’t right. Too big, too small, too long, too short. Nothing worked, and I was doing this all while holding a rare and difficult yoga position that I had achieved by pure chance.

I was this close to reaching a state of blissful meditation (not to mention drilling a hole in the oven), when I heard a drop of water hit the countertop behind me. I looked up, and watched a little flurry of drops hit in the same spot. The ceiling was leaking. Again.

This had happened before. A lot. Water would mysteriously collect in a little pool behind my roommate’s closet. After a while, the pool would overflow, sending water seeping through the kitchen ceiling.

I thought of fixing the problem the way I’d done it before; by vacuuming out the pool, and waiting another few weeks until it happened again. But this time, I was fed up.

“I can fix this,” I said to my girlfriend, who was helping me clean the kitchen.

“What are you going to do?” she said, giving me more or less the same look I’d get a few hours later from the hardware-store guy.

“I have no idea,” I said, as if that were a plan in itself. “But I know there’s some plumbing stuff out in the garage.”

Before she could say anything else, I was gone. Off to collect miscellaneous plumbing tools I’ve accumulated. A random O-ring; a few mismatched washers; an empty tube of plumber’s grease. If plumbing were like making a stew, I’d be fine. Just throw in a bunch of vaguely related ingredients, heat and stir, and presto, no more leaky faucets. But plumbing is markedly more complicated than that.

That’s what I discovered when I started disassembling the bath fixture. Everything had weirdly threaded screws and nuts, and nothing seemed to come apart easily. On top of that, it was all coated in a thick layer of grime and rust and mildew.

On top of that, I had no idea how to disassemble, fix, or reassemble a bath fixture. I’d brought up my trusty reference, “America’s Handyman Book,” which was created by the fine staff of “The Family Handyman Magazine” in 1961, but nothing seemed to address my problem. The book is illustrated with over 2,100 photographs and diagrams (including one on the cover of a prim-and-proper housewife bringing her crew-cut husband coffee and donuts while he’s doing his man-work). But none of them resembled what I was looking at. The only thing that made any sense was a photo of a plaid-shirted arm removing a leaky faucet handle, with the following caption below: “Use smooth-jawed wrench to remove large nut holding down the spindle housing. Don’t scar the chrome.”

For some reason, this impressed me. Don’t scar the chrome, I said to myself, as I hunted through my “plumbing tools” for the appropriate wrench. But to my utter surprise and disbelief, all I could find was wrenches with deep, scarifying teeth.

I ran to the car and sped off to the hardware store, along the way repeating don’t scar the chrome, don’t scar the chrome. Of course, along the way I also forgot the name of the tool I was going there for, which was, simply, a smooth-jawed wrench.

And so I arrived in the cabinet hardware aisle, standing in my naked ignorance before a man who could barely stand to look at me.

“What do you mean by flat-faced?” he said, struggling to appear helpful.

“Well, you see, I’m changing my bath fixture, and I need to remove the, uh, valve-thingy, but I don’t want to scar the chrome, so I came here for a flat-faced monkey wrench. Heh.”

I smiled. He cocked his head and frowned, and then started walking away.

“Follow me,” he said. “I think I know what you need.”

YES! Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes! Fooled ‘em again, ha-HA!

I walked behind him in utter glee, pumping my fist. He led me directly to a wall full of adjustable crescent-wrenches – all of which were smooth-jawed – and I found a medium-sized one that looked particularly sturdy. “I’m going to take you home,” I whispered to it, winking. “And we’re going to remove that little faucet-valve-thingy without so much as touching the chrome.”

With that, I whirled and walked out, whistling a little tune as I went. Just me and my flat-faced, smooth-jawed, adjustable monkey-crescent-wrench.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 9th, 2004 at 6:55 am and is filed under Home-ownership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.