aw crap.

Welcome to homeownership is what they say...

This morning I noticed that the drip drip drip of the tub faucet had started to be a dribble dribble dribble coming out of the hot-water tap. I sent Andrea an email from work letting her to know about it so she didn't turn the hot water on too much to let it start leaking again. Well....I received a hysterical phone call from her screaming about "The water! The water! How do I turn the water off???!!!!" and everything else was pretty unintelligible. Digital cell phones use something called a vocoder. What it does is convert the analog sound wave into digital information, and in the process reduces the size of the information packet by both stripping out the higher and lower frequencies and also by sort of not playing back entire sounds, but more like playing back the differences in the sounds from one "frame" to the next. This is pretty advanced stuff. Well, see, they also do something where they transmit at different baud rates when they detect different levels of sound. That's why when someone stops talking, sometimes you may think the call has dropped (because of the sudden silence) but they are actually still there (and in danger of entering a "Hello?" loop when you say hello then they say hello, and you say hello again because you don't know if they are responding to your hello or are saying hello spontaneousely because they suddenly can't hear you either...). The vocoder drops anything below a certain sound level to avoid taking up precious network bandwidth with the sounds of passing cars or the wind blowing, or light breathing, or has stopped transmitting completely. That's also why if someone is talking to you on a cellphone and there is loud music in the background they will break up or become unintelligible as the vocoder is essentially sending the changes between previous frame and current frame, which are chock full of sound information. It all compresses into a solid chunk with the wrong parts stripped out, and all you hear is junk, or possibly nothing at all as the vocoder may be set to toss out frames that are obviously full of audio noise which takes up network bandwidth and conveys no useful info. Anyway, thats why when a hysterical person screaming into a cellphone might as well be using sign language in the dark - frustrating and inneffectual. And telling that person, "Calm down, I can't understand anything you are saying" automatically translates into "Please scream louder, I can't under stand you. If you scream loud enough maybe I can hear you without a phone."

Long story short, the hot water knob had literally shot of of the shower and doused Andrea with nearly scalding hot water (luckily I had the water heater set on the recommended energy-saving middle-of-the-dial temp). She instinctively tried to hold the water back with her hands, which probably helped some of the water force its way backwards and down behind the wall.

So she got the water turned off and then was faced with 2 issues: She now had absolutely no water in the whole house, and she has to pee every 15 minutes because she's pregnant. And she's worried that her new house may have been flooded.

There seemed to be a bit of a runaround with the home warranty people not being able to pull up our contract, etc etc and everyone wanted to make sure we got taken care of. 24 hours later we had a wonderfully helpful plumber who told Andrea that there was nothing actually wrong with our shower except that when the hot tap valve, which was newly replaced, had been installed it was not fastened correctly and was slowly working its way loose. This was inevitable, which means that it was guaranteed to happen while I was at work.

We had some minimal water leak down through the ceiling into the kitchen, which in my mind was the most disturbing and upsetting part of the whole ordeal. But it was a very little amount and its probably already dried up completely (fingers crossed). So we got the shower fixed and to top it off the plumber also caulked around the fixtures (which he said had not been done either) with silicone.

Sigh. Learning experiences suck.