Everybody has little quirks that can be annoyingly difficult or impossible to overcome. People can’t figure out how to peel hard boiled eggs without wrecking the surface (hint: get under the membrane by starting at the blunt end). Folks chronically forget to fill the gas tank until their vehicle sputters to a halt (and it’s usually on a holiday when prices are jacked up). Others misplace their car keys. We get it, and we sigh and muddle our way through such obstacles.
Another such roadblock to a smooth life is inanimate objects, whether it’s never being able to flick a lighter to life, keep a shoelace tied, or getting your electronic pass read at the bridge or parking garage. Daily progress comes to a complete stop when something doesn’t work the way it should. Hollywood even wastes footage because of malfunctioning props, so we’re all subject to it.
Lately I have been having a war of epic stature with garden hoses.
The hoses my parents had did finally surrender to old age, and I needed to replace them, but luck is not on my side. I have gone through about a dozen of these outdoor must-have contraptions, and for the life of me I cannot get them to function.
When I saw an ad for a convenient hose which weighed next to nothing and expanded and shrank on its own, I thought it must be the holy (or hosey) grail of water delivery devices. The legacy variety kinks up, never stores easily, handles in the most unwieldy fashion, picks up dirt and debris as it’s dragged from the faucet to whatever you will be watering, and is never the right size for the yard in which it’s being used.
Something light in weight that wouldn’t kink seemed a godsend. So I bought one.
Turns out the thing is really an elongated bladder wrapped by a woven cover. Sure, it carries easily and can drape around its holder in half the time of the stiff and stubborn original. However, while it’s expanding it can ruin your landscaping and mow down your shrubbery and flowers. It requires some finagling to figure out how many washers the female coupling needs inside the screw to avoid getting showered with water. No matter what I’ve done, they always leaked. I always got wet.
They are also sensitive and prone to bursting internally, which effectively ends their lifespan. One lasted eight months, and the other about three. I moved to a new-fangled flat product still guaranteed not to kink, but it didn’t make it through two seasons. So, back to the permanently curled old standby for my next attempt.
I managed to hook up the hose (righty loosey, lefty tighty), turned it on, and got a free shower.
Dragged the curly little darling out of the leaking firing line, along the length of the driveway to straighten it out, then moved toward my target for the morning: the birdbath, to give the poor avian world some fresh cool water during a heatwave with temperatures over 100 degrees. I turned on the nozzle and got nothing.
The gosh-darned thing had kinked (and I didn’t actually say gosh-darned).
Went back to unkink the hose, which usually looks something like that rope exercise one does in the gym to strengthen the upper arms and turn them into biceps which could feed a family of four zombies. Only this model of hose doesn’t undulate at all. I had to unwind it like an anaconda fresh out of the permafrost.
Finally, I managed to turn on the nozzle and get a genuine jet of water to wash out the birdbath and fill it with fresh water. Mission accomplished. Sort of. Still needed to put the hose back to someplace it had never been before.
A fifty-foot hose with the attitude of a snake is a son of a gun to wrestle into any semblance of order. My hose caddy is an F-shaped device on which one supposedly can wind the entire length of hose around and have the end result look like it did when purchased from the hardware store. Truth is it looks more like the cat got to the anaconda. Each coil is a different size, but when you’ve had this experience with hoses you know, like Kenny Rogers said, when to fold. The thing is on one place, and that’s that.
This may be my cross to bear for a few years, having bought the gold standard of a product which has “always worked” just the way it is. Or rather we have grown to accept its flaws and go into battle knowing the outcome won’t be pretty.
Just pretty wet.
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 