Are we soft yet?

No, that was NOT a personal question. It was rhetorical.

(If you don’t know what a “rhetorical” question is, look it up. It’s a very good word. I ask a lot of rhetorical questions.)

So, back to “soft.” I’m referring, as I’m sure all of you know, to the “softening up” process that the resistentialism conspiracy is putting us through.

If the resisitential forces are “smart” enough to know, I guess the answer is that I, at least, am NOT soft enough by their standards. Which is good, because that means the really bad, expensive problems and failures are still around the corner.

This weekend it was our icemaker. The little arm that goes up and down to stop the device from filling up the entire freezer with ice, wouldn’t go all the way down. Now right there you can see that this is a MINOR problem. Why? Because that meant that the icemaker would not make any ice.

(If the arm is UP, that stops ice production. You knew that, right? If not, take my word for it.)

You see, if the arm would not go UP the device WOULD have jammed every rack and shelf with so much ice it would take me half the Texas summer to defrost the appliance. As it was, it just stopped dumping the ice it made until I pushed the arm down the last half-inch.

Now the apparent problem is that the spring pulling the arm down has weakened with age. But we all know the spring is fine, right? It’s the conspiracy again, no doubt. I could have tried to find a replacement spring, but getting to that darned little piece of coiled steel is a real challenge.

Not to mention finding a small part for anything at all these days. All appliances are made so that when the smallest part fails you have to replace the whole “assembly.” That guarantees the manufacturer more profit. Yeah, it’s wasteful. But profit trumps everything else today, it seems.

So what did I do? I took a two-ounce lead fishing sinker (minus the hook and line) and duct-taped it to the little arm. Thus weighted, the arm drops all the way down despite the weak spring. Problem solved. Total repair time, about two minutes. Most of that was spent finding a utility knife to cut a strip of duct tape the proper width.

So now the ice maker is happily making ice again.

I just hope the duct tape doesn’t spring a loose end that sticks the arm down so the machine fills up the freezer with ice. If that happens, Carol will likely ask some questions that will NOT be rhetorical.

She might even throw in a little extra rhetoric, just to get her point across.