Have you ever gone out to work in the morning and left the tap dripping? Then when you get home, you can see it’s been dripping all day but it’s okay, because the drips have just gone down the plug hole.
Imagine then that you’d accidentally left a cup under the dripping tap, so that by the time you got home, the cup was full, maybe even overflowing, but the overflow has gone down the plug, and you empty the cup, and it’s all okay again.
Now imagine that the cup has been sat on top of the plug hole all day, and the cup has overflowed but the sink is there to catch it, and you can move the cup when you get home, and all the water drains away and it’s okay again.
What if the cup got stuck over the plug hole and the tap just wouldn’t stop dripping, however hard you try?
You call a plumber, because you have insurance, and you were told that this particular type of tap is known for dripping, and that the insurance company promised you that if and when it happened, they knew the right person to help fix the drip. So the plumber comes and looks at the tap, and says you just need to try turning it off better.
And the drips continue.
So you ask the insurance company to send another plumber. The sink is getting fuller, you can’t drain it easily any more and the cup isn’t budging, and still it drips. More and more frequently, the tap flows freely, filling the cup and sink more quickly.
Plumber after plumber comes, and none can stop the constant drip. They say it’s your technique; that if you had looked after the tap properly this would never have happened. The insurance company give you a list of all of the different plumbers they have sent, and say that you just need to learn more about taps.
The sink overflows. The floor underneath gets damaged, and you think maybe they’re right, maybe you’re just really bad at working the taps, maybe you should never have been allowed your own sink in the first place, because everyone else knows how to switch the taps off. People tell you regularly that they have the exact same brand of tap and they have no drips, or when they do, they just switch the tap off, and you should just do the same.
Now the floorboards are rotting, and the tap is running, and you should have looked after your taps and your sink and your floorboards better, the insurance company and the plumbers have written that down on their reports, and reports are really expensive and you should be grateful that they wrote it down, instead of complaining about your taps and your sink and your floorboards.
welcome to my life