Reset Button

Our garbage disposal has not been working for about a month and a half. It just stopped one day when Kris’ mom happened to be using it, it wasn’t her fault, she wasn’t putting old tennis-shoes into it or anything, it just stopped. I have been meaning to look at our home warranty to see if small appliances like that are covered but to be honest, I don’t know where it is. Kris has it filed somewhere and I keep forgetting to ask him at a convenient time. In the meantime, a friend of mine came by one afternoon and as the kids were playing we talked and she mentioned that a lot of disposals have reset buttons on them. I took the time to see if I could find a reset button, but as soon as I looked under the sink I was discouraged. The water filter sits right in front of the disposal and the disposal is backed into a corner. I couldn’t even find a label to tell me what kind of disposal we have. The location of the sink in the corner of the kitchen, the depth of the sink and the fact that it’s all at an angle were all factors that kept me from doing anything about our disposal problem. If I call a plumber and it’s a simple reset button I would be really aggravated with myself. Of course in all of this time I continue to keep Kris in the dark. I have so many more pressing issues to talk about in our limited conversation time and since he rarely uses the garbage disposal he doesn’t remember at all that it’s not working.

Apparently it is a common thing for dishwashers to be hooked up to disposals and pump the dirty water into them while cleaning dishes. When the disposal isn’t working this is bad because there’s no where for the dirt in that dirty water to go. After a month and a half of misguided dirty water things were starting to back up a little. The water would always drain but it was taking much longer to do it.

On Saturday a combination of Kris being a bit under the weather, the boys getting a little too wedged under my skin, the realization that I was missing two meetings and then the dirty water back up in my vegetable sink put a little fire under me. I grabbed a flashlight and planted myself on the floor in front of the sink cabinet. I fiddled and fumbled until I had removed the imposing water filter and within seconds found the mysterious reset button and had the disposal working. The water filter went back in without any trouble at all and I felt like I had gained a victory.

If only the reset button could take me back a month and a half. I would push it much sooner if it did.