Crisitunity
August 17th, 2009 by Chris Eng
Lisa: Dad, did you know the Chinese have the same word for ‘crisis’ as they do for ‘opportunity’?
Homer: Yes! Crisitunity!
It could have been a lot worse than it was, but it still sucked.
Over the past year or so, “the office” in our house has morphed into “the storeroom” and things that I’ve decided not to immediately part with but which we we don’t have room for in the rest of our modest-sized house have made their way there.
Yesterday, after Carla and I came home from a lunch/shopping/window-shopping expedition we discovered our landlord (who lives in the suite above us) at our door in a bit of a state. It seems the pipes were backing up in the house. The laundry room had flooded with black water and he wasn’t sure where the blockage was coming from. He did, however, need two things from us:
1) To not use the water at all, maybe for another 24 hours or so.
2) Access to the storeroom where the plumbing access valves were hidden in the walls.
After not being able to get into the access valves himself, he called in a favour from a plumber friend who came over and determined that our personal plumbing wasn’t blocked and we could use our water (yay), but that he couldn’t find the blockage in their plumbing, so he needed a plumbing snake to find it. They went off to Home Depot to rent one, but not before telling us: “You’re going to need to move some of this stuff out of here.”
“How much of it?”
“Whatever you don’t want potentially flooded.”
Considering that almost every box in that room was filled with books, I considered that as an encouragement to empty the room top to bottom–posters, stuff on shelves, EVERYTHING. And so we did. In 20 minutes flat, Carla and I emptied the room to the bare walls. And just as we moved out the last box, our landlord and the plumber returned with the snake.
Long story shorter, they found the blockage (NB for GeekUnplugged Readers: don’t put grease and coffee grounds down the garburator–your pipes won’t like it), only sprayed down the walls with a bit of black water, cleaned up the mess (thankfully) and departed. The only problem was that the contents of the storage room were still in our living room. Carla and I could have just moved them back (probably in only another 15 minutes or so), but I preferred to see it as an opportunity to strip down my belongings yet again.
See, my problem with keeping stuff in storage is that, by definition, the various belongings aren’t available to access. And if you can’t access them, you can’t use them, so why do you have them? I know I may have more display space eventually (though I’m not counting on it), and some of the things I don’t have room for I do still want, but I bet I don’t need everything in the 20+ boxes that were in there.
So, before the Chris & Carla Overflow Project goes back into storage, I’m going to go through all of it again to see how much I can live without. In point of fact, I’m going to challenge myself to take advantage of this near-disaster and get rid of as much stuff as humanly possible. I’ll report back when I’m done and let you know how well I took advantage of this crisitunity.
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