The faucet in our kitchen sink leaks. It drips about once per minute. Plop. Plop. Plop. I have found that by positioning the handle “just so”, you can get it to (mostly) stop dripping. Also, if you put the faucet in exactly the right position, the drops hit the side of the sink and roll down from there. It doesn’t stop it from dripping. It just stops me from hearing it.

At Lowe’s, Susan found the part we needed to replace to make the sink stop leaking. It’s a little plastic round piece and a little rubber seal. It cost $2. Susan said she could fix it herself. I let her try.

An hour or so later, I got roped into “putting it back together”. I was at a disadvantage however, not having seen how it came apart. There were only four or five parts and most of them only fit together one way. Together we reassembled the parts, turned the water on, and got … nothing. Just a dribble out of the faucet. So, we took it apart and reassembled it the same way we had before. Still, nothing. This continued off and on for a couple of hours.

We finally got the cold water working, but not the hot. Since it’s a single faucet, this was confusing. Thinking maybe something clogged up the “feed”, Susan turned on the hot water while I stuck a screwdriver down the hole to unclog it. It worked. Warm water shot out of the faucet so fast and so hard that it left probably a 2′ radius circle of water on the kitchen ceiling, and another 1′ circle on the dining room ceiling. We had to take a break at that point to dry off everything that had been sitting on the counter including my phone, my iPod, my wallet, and some papers. Oh yeah, and my face.

After taking something apart and putting it back together a dozen or so times, you start to get a pretty good feel for it. The last time we reassembled the faucet, I was sure we had everything right. We turned the water on, and it worked!

Except, it still dripped. And faster than before. Drip-drip-drip. We went from once a minute to about 10 times a minute. Drip-drip-drip.

Fast forward to today, as the plumber was fixing the sink for us. (He was actually there to fix a toilet. The sink repair was a bonus.)

“You see here? These things?” (No. I couldn’t see them.) “There’s your problem, right there. See how they’re all rough right there?” (No.) “That right there’s why it’s leaking.” Two minutes later, the problem had been fixed. No more drip-drip-drip.

For some reason, that brief exchange with the plumber reminded me of one I had many years ago with a friend. My friend had bought a second hard drive and was trying to install it into his computer. Back in the days of IDE drives, you could connect two hard drives to a single IDE cable. If you only had one hard drive connected, you didn’t need to use a jumper. If you connected two drives, you needed to physically use little jumpers to tell the computer which hard drive was “master” and which one was “slave”. It didn’t really matter which was which, although most computers tend to boot from the master drive by default. If neither drive had a jumper or both were set to the same position, the computer would not recognize the hard drives, get confused, and fail to boot.

My friend told me that he had tried every conceivable jumper combination and was convinced not only that something was wrong with the new hard drive, but that he had lost all his data off the old hard drive as well. I looked at the drives and, as I suspected, the jumpers were completely wrong. I changed his original drive to be the master and set the new one to be a slave. When we turned the computer on, the machine booted immediately. Problem solved.

Eventually my fried would have got the jumper combination right by guessing, but based on his rampant flailing it was obvious to me that he had no concept of what the jumpers did or what the settings actually meant. Likewise, I’m sure my plumber thought the same thing about me this morning as he replaced those two tiny rubber pieces and fixed our leaky sink in two minutes.

I know more about hard drives than most plumbers. That’s all I’m saying.