You know the sound. You're doing the dishes and you click on the garbage disposal to clear out the drain, but instead of a smooth whir you hear a loud clanging and grinding. It happens all the time at our house, and usually it's something simple like a spoon or the top of a sippy cup. (We really need to move on from the sippy cups.)
You also know what happens next. You quickly switch off the disposal, turn off the water, and tentatively reach your hand into the drain to retrieve whatever it is that's fallen into the abyss. Intellectually, you know that what you're doing is perfectly safe. Nothing could happen. Not a thing.
But when your hand is stuck in the drain and your fingers are probing in and out of a set of steel blades designed to mash and pulverize, certain thoughts can creep into your head. There could be a fluke power surge. There might be some "residual electricity" in the line that could cause the disposal to switch on. Aliens could land in your neighborhood and the magnetic field from their ship could cause every electrical appliance on the block to come to life. Heck, your wife might wander into the kitchen to turn on a light and flick the wrong switch. PLENTY of completely plausible things could happen. Sure, you might be looking for a twisted fork, but in your mind's eye you're finding a disfigured hand and several mangled fingers. But I digress.
What this story is really about is what I found in the garbage disposal today when the blades started complaining. Not a spoon, not a fork, not a chicken bone, but a skateboard. If you're not a teacher or you don't have boys of a certain age, you might not recognize the broken toy in the picture up above. It's a Tech Deck, a miniature skateboard, and somehow this particular one had found its way into the sink and down the drain where it waited until I turned on the garbage disposal.
Kate discovered the wreckage just as I finished fishing out all the parts, and immediately asked me to fix it, which was kind of amusing. I put her off until tomorrow, hoping against hope that she'll forget about it, but I really don't think I'll be that lucky. The good news, though, is that she'll probably unleash a tantrum so hellacious that I'll have something interesting to write about tomorrow night. So I've got that going for me. Which is nice.
And those Tech Deck microscopic screws-- who thought of those? Fish any of those out of the sink?
Posted by: Lisa | June 19, 2009 at 10:18 PM
Nooooooo! Not the skateboard. Bummer. It is funny how we imagine that some how the switch is going to flip itself on when digging around. I suppose it's along the same line sof me thinking a monster is going to eat my feet when they hang off the end of the bed, go figure.
Posted by: Surfer Jay | June 22, 2009 at 11:56 PM