7/6/09 Disposal Diaries

Oh ya'll, this is going to sound totally vain and egotistical, but I need to share it with someone anyway, so just bear with me.

I am, as the kids are saying now, "da man". *

Either that or I'm a total doofus for not seeing something really obvious and simple about a month ago.

But I'm choosing to go with "da man".

See, a few weeks ago, Tony went to put something down the garbage disposal, and it didn't work. Not like, "Oh help, the blades are stuck" kind of not working, but the "Not even making a peep" kind of not working. It was, in professional plumber-speak, dead.

And of course, Tony immediately turns around, puts his hand on his hips and bellows, "Goose! What did you do to the garbage disposal?!?" And before you get all morally outraged on my behalf that he immediately blamed me for killing the disposal when in truth it could have been anyone, just let me say that statistically, I'm probably a safe bet. (See, I belong to the view that kitchen appliances will do what they're supposed to do. We do not need to coddle them. If they're going to stay in my house, they're going to have to pull their weight.** So I do not pre-rinse before stuff goes into the dishwasher, and I figure that the garbage disposal will dispose of anything that I throw at it. Egg shells? Cucumbers? Entire rack of lamb? Stuff that baby down, I say! Tony, however, is totally suckered by these appliances. He not only pre-rinses, he just flat out washes the dishes completely before they go into the dishwasher, and he pre-chops everything to paper-thin consistency before he even considers easing it gently down the drain. So chances are good that if the disposal quit, it did it out of offence at my abuse). Still, that didn't stop me from being all morally outraged anyway and yelling back, "What makes you think that I did it?" And he answered by sticking his hand down the disposal (ew! Ew! EWWWW!), pulling out some watermelon rinds that I had tossed in there earlier, and then giving me that one raised eyebrow look that says, "And you were saying?"

Don't you hate it when men are right?

And yes, okay, I'll cop to the watermelon rinds, because I still maintain that they should have been no problem for something called an Insinkerator, (which just sounds like it can handle anything, doesn't it?) but I'm not conceding that they were what actually broke the disposal.
(Alas, even after the watermelon rinds were removed, the disposal still sat there, giving us the silent treatment. And it looked like this was going to be the end of our disposaling days).

Fast forward a few weeks, with Tony occasionally mentioning that we need to get a new disposal and me not doing anything about it. Until today, when I finally got around to comparing disposal prices and installation plans and blah, blah, blah. And by the way, if you haven't looked at installation prices for replacing a garbage disposal? It's more than the actual disposal itself! For what the Lowes guys told me would be about half an hour's worth of work, tops! And that's about the time that my miser-meter kicked in and I said something like, "I have no idea how the plumbing and electrical go for installing a garbage disposal, but I refuse to pay ransom rates for some bald guy with a plumber's crack to climb under my kitchen sink for 20 minutes when I can very well figure out how to do that myself"***

So under the sink I went, and started examining the current disposal so I could remember what hose went where when I brought the new one home. And you know what I noticed? (Ya'll are going to think I'm really stupid here for not doing this earlier). I noticed that there was a little button on the bottom of my garbage disposal that looked a whole lot like the little button that I had seen while studying these installation instructions online. The one on the online instructions was called a "reset button". And apparently, you're supposed to push this reset button after removing, say, watermelon rinds. And I thought, "what the hey, it couldn't break it any more than it is now", so I pushed it. (Have you guessed what happened yet?) It worked! Who knew that following instructions on how to use your garbage disposal would actually allow you to use your garbage disposal? I know, I'm amazed too. Not to mention happy that I don't have to spend over $200 for a new disposal and Bubba to come out and install it.

Now, don't tell Tony that all I did was hit the reset button, because when he gets home, I plan on making a huge production about how I spent hours working to fix the current disposal. I'm scattering my biggest wrenches around the kitchen floor so it looks like I did a major overhaul on the whole thing. It's the only way to redeem myself for breaking it in the first place. Plus it gives him a reason to keep me around, because after all this tinkering with the disposal, I'm suddenly in the mood for some watermelon.

Three guesses where the rinds are going.



* Are kids still saying that these days? I'm not really sure, seeing how I am so far removed from what the cool kids are saying that we're in different solar systems. In my day, we said "da bomb" or "bomb-diggity" or something like that. So if "da man" is out, please substitute "da bomb" or whatever wording will not make me seem like a complete and total loser.
** Ironic coming from me, huh?
*** Well, minus the baldness and plumber's crack, anyway.