Getting a job done properly is not necessarily a sign of an amazing talent or skill. Sometimes its just having the right tool.
Knowing what the right tool is … now THAT is wisdom. Knowing how to use a tool? That’s a skill.
In my case, the right tool is a tattoo wash bottle.
Yup, of all the guys I know, a tattoo wash bottle is about the LEAST likely tool that I would ever need. But this tool gets the job done.
What job?
Our refrigerator has an automatic ice maker. Yes, I’m spoiled. The ice is made automatically without the need for those clumsy, broken ice cube trays.
When it works.
The problem is that the ice maker fills by directing the water to flow through a short, flexible black tube that focuses the stream through a chute and into the reservoir.
When it works.
When it doesn’t work, it’s always because the black tube has become frozen solid with an icicle that blocks the water flow. So, how do you unfreeze a tube with a minimum of fuss?
Solution # 1 was to call a repairman, before we knew about the unfocused ice accumulator that is our ice maker. The repairman put water in a nifty little injector with a long wire tip, and the problem was solved in moments. He left the house a bit richer, and I was standing there a bit poorer wondering why I was so ignorant of the ways of the ice maker. We didn’t call the repairman to unfreeze the black tube again.
Solution # 2 was to improvise a tool that could direct a stream of hot water into the black tube and unfreeze it. DIY at its best. Unfortunately, the closest we had was an old salad dressing squeeze bottle that had an short tip that was about 1/4″ across. That directed the water in the general direction, but the tip was too short and inflexible to get in the right position. The inevitable result was that water went everywhere when we had to unfreeze the ice maker.
And I do mean everywhere.
We put a dish towel under the ice maker to soak up all we could, but it was a total mess, every time.
So I began to search for a better tool. Once I found the tattoo squirt bottle, the amount of water needed to unfreeze the tube dropped from about 20 ounces to about 1 ounce. The mess went from really annoying to no mess at all.
I wasn’t any smarter. I wasn’t more skillful.
But I had the right tool.
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