So, yesterday, before the big gas main debacle, I had planned to have a bunch
of people over, and one of them was someone kinda new, and I wasn’t sure
about their bidet-use policy.

See, I have a bidet in my place, but I’m far from knowing how to use it. I’ve
tried twisting some of the knobs now and then to see what happens. It tends
to shudder and groan and trickle, so I usually turn off the water and just
leave it be. (It’s very tempting to fill it with fish!)

Anyhow, I figured if Jen wanted to use it, and knew how, It’d probably make a
bad impression if it just sat there and shook and made funny noises. So I
played with some knobs in back and looked at the little spraying doo-kickey,
and noticed that it looked clogged up with salts. I have hard water.

I grabbed my drawing compass (that thing with two sharp points you use to
make circles) and tried boring out the little holes a little, to great
effect. I could feel the salts crumbling away.

As I put my hand on the sprayer knob, this Bill Nye sequence played out in my
mind. Water through a big pipe has low pressure, but when you force it
through a small pipe, it has -HIGH- pressure. What if my holes weren’t bored
out fully?

I didn’t get to the conclusion in time to stop my hand from twisting, and a -
jet- of water shot out of the fountain, hitting the ceiling, and raining down
all over my bathroom, knocking me over and soaking -everything-.

It was like a scene out of a submarine movie, where the pipe breaks and
everyone goes scurrying away while the one engineer guy grips the valve and
makes all kinds of funny faces while pushing his way up the jetstream.

An hour or so mopping seemed to dry it out pretty good. Never had to mop the
ceiling before, though.