Job Months

Leave a comment August 17, 2025 Steve A. Wiggins

I’m sure you’ve had them too. Job-like months when everything seems to happen all at once. Your bank account grows anemic, making Quicken feel more like quicksand. Our most recent started when the roof leaked yet again during heavy storms—I sure am glad climate change isn’t real! Can you imagine how it’d be if we had extreme weather? This house dates from the late nineteenth century and presumably, if such super-soakers had always been common, well, the roof would’ve been replaced down to the joists. In any case, in our fourth call to the roofers over seven years, we faced yet another scary bill. Then the sink began to leak. Some minor repairs I can do myself, but this house was an either a DIY’s paradise or purgatory. For us, mainly the latter.

A couple years back there was a leak from the upstairs toilet tank. Now, I’ve replaced the guts of a toilet more than once. I bought the parts and went to work. It was then that I discovered a previous owner had purchased a fancy-brand toilet for which toilet guts couldn’t be purchased (well, maybe from Japan or China, by slow boat). You’ll probably agree that without an outhouse, a working toilet is more or less a necessity. I watched YouTube and my wife and I went to Lowe’s and bought a new toilet. I’m sure angels were laughing watching the two of use wrestle this metric-ton porcelain throne up the stairs (and demons laughed as we got the old one down). Installing it looked straightforward. When it started to leak, the plumber—we’re on a first-name basis now—came over. He pointed out the faulty mounting pipe and asked if I’d installed it. It was from the previous owner with high-class taste in toilets. He turned to his companion and said, “This is why we’ll never go out of business.”

So a twenty-dollar toilet gut replacement turned into a $600 full toilet replacement. This was in my mind when I had my head under the sink. We seem to have stopped the water getting in from above, at least for the moment, but now it was clear that the base cabinet under the sink was going to need to be replaced as well. I called Doug and he said he’d slot me in as quickly as he could. I’m pretty sure Job didn’t have indoor plumbing. He probably had to repair his own roof a time or two, though. Only in his case, it happened just before God made a bet with Satan. So the story goes.

Toil et cetera

1 Comment January 23, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

Few items are as necessary for modern day life than a functioning toilet. If you live in town and don’t have an outhouse your other options are pretty limited. Religion scholars tend to know quite a bit about what goes on in toilets, so I’ve repaired my fair share over the years. When we had a leak in a fill valve, I had to wait for a weekend to do the repair. I figured half an hour and thirty dollars at most. I left it for an afternoon project. Once I got the new fill valve installed, there was a problem. The tank wouldn’t fill with water. It had been clear that the faulty part was the fill valve, as it was hissing and sputtering and there were no leaks into the bowl. I made a late trip to Lowes for another valve, following the logic that the one I’d bought earlier must’ve been defective. It didn’t work either. We had to flush by buckets of water.

Sunday after church I rushed to Lowe’s since, logic dictates, it has to be the flush valve that was the problem. These are the only two parts inside a toilet tank that require repair. So I got the tank off, and after running to the hardware store to buy a specialized tool to get the nut of the valve off, I learned that “fits 99% percent of toilets” left that troubling 1 percent for a reason. Our toilet was special. The parts were not standard size and neither my local hardware store nor Lowes had the parts in stock. If we wanted a working toilet that day we would need to replace the entire thing. So we went toilet shopping. Hauling a toilet up the stairs is something I hope never to have to do again. By late Sunday afternoon my half-hour, thirty-dollar project had turned into a multi-day, three-hundred dollar project. I followed the installation instructions religiously, but, of course, it leaked.

I ended up having to call the local plumber we’ve got on speed-dial. We’re in our fourth year in our house and we had plumbers here at least six times. I picture their office assistant grimacing each time our number comes up on their caller ID. The plumber came and, apart from generating serious tool envy on my part, demonstrated how everything from the soil pipe up had been misinstalled by over-confident DIYers. I try not to cut corners with plumbing or electrical. Despite how easy it is to install, or even repair, a toilet, you have to have the correct foundation. And even scholars of religion need to admit when they’re in over their heads.

Out of the Depths

Leave a comment July 24, 2011 Steve A. Wiggins

You’d think that a lifetime of theological study would be excellent training for repairing a toilet. If, however, you live in an old rental unit that has been ritually neglected for decades and that has a plumbing system designed by the Marquis de Sade’s evil twin, you’d soon think otherwise. All I tried to do was replace the flapper—something I learned how to do before leaving home. When the overflow tube snapped off, corroded all the way through at the bottom, I figured I’d just replace the unit. The bolts holding the toilet tank, however, were installed before Noah even built the ark and therefore wouldn’t budge. The leverage room for a wrench, is, of course, negligible. So it was, temperature about 100 degrees, no air-conditioning, no working toilet (bad combination) on a weekend, that I came to face the human condition once again.

As biological creatures, humans have constructed themselves a grand, spiritual universe that kindly overlooks the basics of daily living. Religion, in origin, seems to have had a survival value. Psychologists have suggested that the sense of hope that religions often project might have led to a stronger desire to thrive. Others have suggested religion is part of the curse of consciousness—aware of our own mortality, we attempt to overcome it like any other obstacle. Religion gives us the leg-up over pure biological existence. Unlike other creatures, many western religions assert, we survive our own deaths to face a (hopefully) better world beyond.

In the meantime, however, we are faced with a messy biological existence. Some of our compatriots in this venture stumble along the way and cannot meet the expectations like those who know how to work the system. Religions have traditionally dictated a moral imperative for those who are in positions of power to assist those who are weak. Of late, however, that has somehow shifted—at least in popular Christianity—to the overarching objective of looking out for one’s self. As a species we are all, rich and poor alike, constrained by the same biological necessities. It would speak well of our religious constructs should they reflect the same. As the temperature climbs once again, and I must face my plumbing nemesis, I realize that the metaphor may go deeper than I originally surmised.