Basic repairs can stretch the patience

– Column –

Every once in a while, I have to break out my creativity, and get to work fixing whatever the most recent thing that decides to break happens to be. A few weeks ago, it was my water bottle.

The water bottle has had a rough life. It’s a metal water bottle and I think my parents probably paid quite a bit for it. Naturally, I accidently keyed it within a few weeks of receiving the gift. A little paint was missing from the outside, but that doesn’t really matter for the workings of the water bottle, so I chalked it up to the water bottle being well-loved.

Not long after that, I was outside and set my water bottle on a window sill so I had both hands free for a second. It fell off and my water bottle landed on the sidewalk. Not only did every person within a two-mile radius of me hear the metal water bottle take on the sidewalk, but the bottle sustained a dent and lost a bit more paint. Oh well.

That poor water bottle gave up. First, it tried to get lost by hiding underneath a chair at a meeting. I did get it back, eventually.

Then, the water bottle tried to lure in a new owner. My co-worker’s little boy likes the squishy knob attached to the seal on the lid on the top of my water bottle. He gets his hands on it every chance he gets. I don’t think the water bottle really wants to live with him. The little guy drops it even more than I do.

Just when I thought all the damage to the water bottle would be cosmetic, the rubber band broke.

The rubber band was between the lid to the water bottle itself. It wasn’t holding the parts together, so it wasn’t imperative. The rubber band was meant to make the lid open with the push of a button. I soon learned that was a perk I enjoyed and missed quite a lot. I could get it open while driving.

At first, I thought I’d live without the rubber band. After all, it was just a luxury. That thought didn’t last long. You had to hold the button in with one hand and lift the lid with the other hand. It didn’t work. I realized I had to do something with it and that replacing the rubber band would probably be the easiest “something.”

I found a rubber band in my house, much to my joy. It came off of a bunch of radishes and was nearly twice the size of the one that broke off of the water bottle, but I was determined to make it work. For the next 10 minutes, I worked at stringing the rubber band through the nooks and crannies of the lid, before struggling to get enough slack to tie the rubber band in a loop.

It did not go as well as I wanted it to. I participated in a number of deep breathing exercises and I think my patience stretched even more than the rubber band itself.

Eventually, the rubber band did go through. It doesn’t look very nice, but it’s in there. And by “it doesn’t look very nice,” I mean it looks really dumb. I’m fine with that. The rubber band mostly does its job.

I had to tie the rubber band, as opposed to simply having it looped over like the original, so the lid no longer opens all the way. Still, it is a vast improvement from the two hands it required to open the bottle before the fix.

Of course, as soon as I had the rubber band secured in my water bottle, I remembered the little rubber hair ties in my closet. Those are even clear and close to the right size, instead of bright blue and proudly proclaiming the radishes to be a product of whatever country it is radishes come from.

I thought about re-doing the fix with the hair ties, before deciding it just wasn’t worth it. That, and I know my Mac-Gyver fix isn’t going to last forever. I look forward to replacing the rubber band again at my earliest inconvenience.