The 10 minute fix for the 3 month problem
For almost 3 months now I have had this ongoing drip in my new shower. It was fine for 5 months when it was nothing but drywall and and sub-floor, but shortly after installing the shower pan, the mebrane, all that tile and then the door itself the shower heads started to leak...
And I didn't know why.
This was killing me. I talked to the guy at the local Home Depot to try and get some insight into what might be wrong, could it be something really, really small that I forgot to do? No luck.
I then emailed the manufacturer who offered a Life Time Warranty on the product (and they do), I explained the situation, they emailed me the new parts - free of charge. So far so good. I received them about 6 weeks ago, and they sat there on my dresser, mocking me each time I got up to get my socks in the morning and in the evening when I had to move them to put down my Ipad.
Mocking me to dare and try to install them on my own.
Everynight for the past 3 months when I have gone to bed I could hear a faint... Drip, Drip, Drip... reminding me of how I was too chicken to fix the problem. Good Night Greg - You "drip, drip, drip".
You are not a plumber, you don't have the experience, you don't know what you are doing - your pathetic attempts will only end in you to putting a hole through the pipes, flooding your subfloor and causing you to rip that beautiful tile and membrane that took you 4 solid weekends to install and cost so much.
I had to bite the bullet this weekend, my permit is about to expire and I need to get this fixed so I can get my final inspection done. So Saturday night, I manned up, turned off the water supply, got out the replacement parts, and replaced them. Turned the water back on, tested the shower heads, no leaks inside the walls, turned them off and...
No Drip, Drip, Drip.
I checked about 5 more times last night before I went to bed and again this morning and throughout the day, it was dry - there was no more drips, no more leaks, no more uncertainty, no more problem.
And all it took was 10 minutes, for both taps, in total. Yes that's right, I internalized the fear of screwing up for the past 6 weeks for a job that took me 10 minutes and over half of that time was spent trying to line up the screws when putting it back together (totally separate from the problem).
It's amazing how, despite all of our advances, we still have the ability to internalize so much fear for the unknown and deconstruct "what we don't know" so analytically versus constructing "what we do know", how we will learn from this experience and take action immediately to solve the problem.
Is this what happens when projects slow down when new features and problems are introduced into the mix? I've seen projects and features pushed because of the unknown, we don't know, it sounds big, lots of unknowns, we're not sure where to start. Watch for it the next time you see this happening in a meeting, feature review or in your own code... the fix could turn out to be 10 minutes of your time.