Hilarious Encounters With the Kitchen Sink

Besides than the 40 falls in 30 seconds from America's Funniest Home Videos that have you rolling on the floor in laughter gasping for breath, another recent event that has made us laugh just as hard is a piece of broken plumbing in the kitchen. Let me introduce to you the culprit:

our kitchen faucet.

The water flowing through our pipes has many minerals that, over time, has calcified and has cemented our swivel faucet into one stationary position. You sure hope that it was facing the direction you wanted before it was rendered unmovable. However, the zeal of young dishwashers to loosen the faucet and to swivel it around the sink as they wash dinner dishes has snapped the head off the extendible hose and has led to two new faucet heads. Ok, so now they know that applying a lot of pressure to one end of a fixed object will snap any weak plastic join in between. Now we have another problem. The threads that screw the faucet head into the extendible hose refuse to stay tight and the head keeps falling off. The first time this was realized, Caleb was washing his hands in the sink with the water spraying full blast as usual. Under the pressure, the threads, which had been slowly loosening over the past hour, let go and the faucet head fell off and the full pressure of of the water hit Caleb right in the forehead. Direct shot! Man down! Caleb screamed and fell back. As Maggie rushed into the kitchen to see what was wrong, she was stunned to see a beautiful, rainbow-arc stream of water shooting from the faucet across the table and nearly reaching the refrigerator at the end of the 15/20 ft room and a wet faced Caleb watching the water display in shocked wonder.

Thankfully, she recovered from her shock faster than Caleb had and lunged forward to turn off the water. Now comes the best part. It was Friday, late afternoon. The embassy office that maintains and fixes any embassy house problems had closed for the weekend. That cyclops of a faucet stared us down all weekend, stealthily waiting for its next unsuspecting, habit-bound victim. And they were many. I can't tell you which one was the funniest: the you did it, you get it - frontal attack; the I'm talking to someone else right now and not paying attention and so get beaned in the back of the head - sneak attack from behind; the I'm standing at the sink minding my own business and someone reaches around me to wash their hands and I get sprayed - betrayed by a traitor; or the I'm cleaning up the casualties of the first attack and I stand up from wiping up the floor just as someone else turns on the water and sprays me in the shoulder - attacked and destroyed. There were many casualties that weekend, and while there was also a lot of laughter, we were so happy to have the new faucet installed as soon as the weekend was over.