One of my favorite parts of my job is when there is a problem. If it's a serious enough problem, anyone who knows anything about the system where the problem is drops what they're doing and does nothing but try to figure out what the problem is. It's really quite a bit like detective work, in that there are clues and puzzle pieces that can be put together can lead an intrepid sleuth to the answer. As a byproduct of lots of people working on the same problem (both together and seperately), it sort of turns into a race. The winner (in the case of yesterday and this morning, me) is rewarded with the satisfaction of solving the problem, being cleverer (or luckier) than other people working on the problem, and having his boss look him straight in the face and say "Great job!" Aaaaaand, it's the time of the year where we're supposed to brag about ourselves for our self-evaluations. Yay.

In other news. I was going to take a shower last night, and Diana told me she had noticed that water was leaking into the shower from around the shower head where it connects to the wall. Which means that there must have been a leak or drip or something inside the wall. I gently put some pressure on the 8" bent pipe that comes out of the wall (that the showerhead is attatched to), and it broke off in my hand. I looked in the hole in the wall, and could see the end of the pipe still threaded into the socket of the main pipes in the wall. I guess it got corroded enough and really weak and started leaking. I'm horrified to think how much water has leaked into that wall for the past however many years.

Anyways, we placed a call into our home insurance place, and they're going to send out a plumber to take a look. I'm really concerned about the general state of our plumbing. We already had one hot-water valve break on us. I can think of two more off the top of my head that are really sticky and hard to turn. I'm also really concerned about plumbers. The last two that we had out wanted to tear down the wall or charge huge amounts of money to replace a broken valve which I replaced myself for $30. DUMB!