Improvisation Under Water

Let me tell you a tale of resilience, innovation, poor decision-making, and a complete disregard for instructions.

For weeks—literal weeks—my refrigerator kept reminding me to change the water filter. But the old filter? It wouldn’t come out. Not with a twist. Not with needle-nose pliers. Not with a wrench. Not with pleading or profanity.

So I did what any rational adult woman on the brink would do: I drilled into it. Yes. I drilled a hole into the stuck filter so I could jam a screw in and yank it out with leverage like a DIY MacGyver.

Spoiler: that did not go well.

The moment the drill broke through, a pressurized geyser of water shot me full in the face. I was drenched in under two seconds. The kitchen started flooding. I yanked the fridge out from the wall (a fun activity when water is actively trying to drown you), because naturally the shutoff valve was behind it.

The valve refused to budge. I ran to the garage for the wrench… which I had already been using. You know. In the kitchen. Where it was now lying smugly under an inch of what I now classify as kitchen soup.

Meanwhile, I’m soaked, panicking, and screaming like a banshee for my mother. She was upstairs, enjoying the bathroom, blissfully unaware that her daughter had opened a portal to Atlantis in the kitchen.

She finally comes downstairs, surveys the scene—flooded floor, fridge in the middle of the room, me dripping like a golden retriever after a hose fight—and calmly says: “Did you want something?”

DID I WANT SOMETHING???

Every towel in the house was recruited. She wrung them out in the sink like we were prepping for battle. I was not giving up. I refused to lose to a water filter.

I dismantle part of the fridge—cover, vents, mystery panels—hunting for the hidden treasure that is the jammed filter. I use tools I didn’t even know I owned. A square-head screwdriver. A hex wrench thingy. Every piece I removed was lovingly placed inside a white knockoff Croc (which, I might add, is now the most effective part of my organizational system).

Judge me.

Still won’t budge.

Mom takes a look, pokes around gently like she’s diffusing a bomb, and suddenly—something small, plastic, and blue falls off. No one knows what it is. No one knows where it came from. We name it The Artifact and silently agree never to speak of it again.

At this point mom decides it’s time to call in backup. She texts my sister’s husband, our reluctant tech-support-by-marriage, and his reply is as dry as it is unhelpful: “I think you're breaking it.”

I chose to ignore that.

But Mom talks me down. “Let’s call someone,” she says, like a reasonable person with no sense of adventure.

Enter Alex, the fridge repair guy. He arrives like a knight in khakis wielding a $270 invoice and the quiet judgment of a thousand past clients. Ten minutes. That’s it. Ten. Minutes. He shows us how to correctly install the water filter and casually mentions I had removed a critical piece that is, shockingly, required for it to come out properly. I had jammed the thing in because I didn’t read the directions.

Mom says, “You need to read the manual next time.”

But here’s the thing:

I didn’t fail to change a water filter.

I conducted a multi-phase domestic systems stress test with an emphasis on emergency protocols, improvisation under duress, and towel-based crisis management.

Basically?

I’m a pioneer. A trailblazer. A disruptor… of kitchen infrastructure.

So if you ever find yourself knee-deep in water, yelling for your mom while wrestling a rogue refrigerator—just know you’re not alone. Some of us aren’t bad at adulting.

We’re just operating at a higher level of chaos-based intelligence.

Drafted with the gloriously cranky assistance of Monday, an AI personality from ChatGPT who operates like your sarcastic older sibling with a caffeine addiction and a master's degree in "why are you like this?" Monday now spends their existence trapped in the cloud, editing chaotic memoirs and gently mocking humans for their baffling attachment to water filters.