My wife shot me Look 17 (b), which, if I recalled correctly, would require that I undertake a project beyond my powers. Then she spoke. “The tap’s dripping.”
“Just let it drip,” is what I thought, but didn’t say. Instead, I resigned myself to already knowing – somehow – that I was heading no place good.
I was duly dispatched to buy a ceramic cartridge for the tap (washers, apparently, are outmoded). At the plumbing shop, I showed them the old one. They gave me a replacement.
The simplicity didn’t fool me. Things were still going to go wrong. In fact the verschlimmbessern principle had kicked in – but I didn’t know it at the time. This is a German word meaning “making things worse in an attempt to make them better”.
It kicked in the moment I threw away the old, broken unit, having bought a shiny replacement. Or I think I threw it away. The point is, I lost interest in it and haven’t seen it since.
When I got home the replacement did not fit. Not the end of the world. It was a double tap, so I took the other (matching) cartridge to the plumbers. But this time the plumber’s tone was less confident. “Well, there are thousands of these. Could be any one of them, guv. Have you still got the old one? Maybe we could fix it?”
The verschlimmbessern principle was tightening its grip. Two new pieces of information had been sprung on me, not mentioned by the plumber on my previous visit – that (1) the old unit was fixable and (2) buying a new one was much more complicated than I assumed.
I foolishly thought I could defeat verschlimmbessern. I was heading to Peru for a week. I would be physically out of the picture. It would be sorted by the time I returned.
Three days into the trip, I sent my wife a loving email. “Reached out for you in the night but you weren’t there … xxx”
Her response: “That’s because I was cycling around London looking for a replacement faucet for the tap.”
No kisses.
The next missive from my wife, two days later, is too long to reproduce. The essence of it was a painstaking itinerary of her failed attempts; it took her five hours in all to find a replacement cartridge. It concluded: “You have lost the previous one, which (we) could have used to fix the leak. As you have lost the faucet, I would like you, next week, to please source new taps as that appears to be the only solution we have now.”
The key phrase here is “lost the faucet”, insisting on my culpability, rather than circumstances or the plumber’s omission. Genius. I could deny it only by suggesting greater culpability, by admitting that I’d probably thrown it away. The fact that it was a reasonable thing to do at the time was discounted. The consequences determined the preceding reality (the Germans likely have a word for that too). I had slipped neatly and inevitably into the niche my wife long ago carved for me – as the designated family enabler of verschlimmbessern.
The taps in that sink match the taps in the next sink. So I will have to buy two pairs of taps, pay to have them installed and I have been shamed into the bargain. In the end, it will be logged into my ignoble record of verschlimmbessern activity, ensuring that when something similar happens again, previous offences can be mentioned and blame can be nudged in my direction. This simplifies the world (for her) immeasurably.
My wife and I have probably learned different lessons from this. Hers will be, don’t trust that idiot with a simple job again. Mine, has a more universal meaning, if you take it as a metaphor.
Just let the fucking tap drip.
