Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Give good directions.

Have you ever asked someone to do something for you, and then wondered, did they not understand? Was this task to difficult? Did I not give good instructions? Quite often, I think that instructions are clear, when they are not, because they are incomplete. Lets take a look at one such incident.

I rearranged my daughters bedroom, at her request, because it contained a water bed. Moving water beds is quite time consuming. There is the draining, the tear down, the set back up, and last, but probably the most important, is the re-filling.
After several hours of all the other steps, I had finally hooked up the garden hose to the outside faucet through the bedroom window. My daughter comes home from school, and says, Dad, thanks for doing this. Her instructions were clear to me and I accomplished my task.

As it was filling, I got a phone call and needed to leave. I told her that if she had to leave for any reason, turn off the hose and I would finish it when I returned.

Just as I pulled back into the driveway, she comes out the front door. She looks kinda panicked. She is moving from one foot to the other and her hands are clasped in a tight knot in the middle of her stomach. I come up the front steps and she says to me, "Dad I have something really bad to show you". She leads me to her bedroom. The water bed, which is normally about 2 1/2 feet tall when fully filled in now almost 5' high. I can barely see over the top. It has also sprung several leaks and there is about a 1/2 of water on the floor. It now resembles a giant sprinkler in the shape of a fat bloated tick.

Just after I left, she had to leave. She did follow my instructions of please turn off the hose. I should have said, turn the handle clockwise, then remove it from the faucet to make sure it doesn't overfill. My failure to give these extra steps to ensure my directions were clear and complete, meant the the bed ran for 2 hours, on high, unattended. The wooden sides have blown off and the water is now running through the floor and has turned the basement into a rain forest. I have now begun the task of draining the water bed. As it starts to go down, this cause it to shift and roll off the platform. It moves like a blob in slow motion, then quickly slams into the wall. The whole house shakes.

Surprisingly, the clean up didn't take that long. The basement has a cement floor, so I just had to squeegeed it over to the drain, the carpet in her room was old so I just pulled it up. She slept with her sister. If you would like to hear her side of the story, visit AbFab

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, I can't believe Jenny would do that. I'm glad I married Julie and I can feel confident that getting the new water bed she asked for will be a wise decision.

Yule {b}Log said...

WHAT?! David Penn, I'm just sure. Julie so totally did this and you know it. As a matter fact, after this I had to teach her "righty tighty, lefty loosey".

Anonymous said...

Tears are streaming down my face right now from laughing so hard that I was wheezing!!! I am so glad Julie came over this morning and we talked about blogging; I just put my sweet kiddos down for their naps, logged on to AbFab, and was curious to know more about this whole story......... This is SO Julie!!!! And that "bloated tick" description- love it! I can't wait for my husband to get home from work so I can ready him this and the rib stories!!! (We had our 1st date at Bones and Brew, but did not partake of any biker's condiments, hee hee!)Good times, great oldies :-)