We’d bought quite a nice one, actually.
It had made sense because we were only the second people ever to have lived in that apartment. Everything was very modern and sleek in there, though it was also restrictively small.
We’d previously satisfied ourselves with cheap water dispensers, usually in the ghastly blue and white of those tracksuit high school uniforms (when will these trends end?).
This time, we’d plumped for something black and dark gold, something like real furniture. Tall, free-standing. Space for paper cups down there.
When we moved again, it came with us. And, though this new apartment, built in 1994, is just the opposite of the previous one, the machine continued to serve us tea-fodder from beside the refrigerator. Until last week.
Perhaps it’s just to give us men face; that’s why the job of replacing the water bottle is given to us. Certainly, there’s nothing very difficult about it; it does mysteriously get done even when we are not there.
Anyway, last week, the job was given to me to crush the water machine beyond repair, wasting several hundred People’s Coins.
Evidently, the robust metal construction of the sides doesn’t continue into the receptacle section in the top; it was a raw plastic beam that was fatally cracked at the back. With the water bottle in place but listing badly, we elected to finish this one before replacing the whole unit. Bad day.
So what’s the moral of the story? Well, maybe women would do this better, actually. Less face invested there. As you know, there’s a certain force required to split that thin plastic seal at the centre of the bottle’s top. Among different bottles, the strength of that seal varies. Sometimes, the mere gravitational force of the bottle is sufficient to break it in one go, sometimes not.
Sometimes (shock, horror) it requires a second attempt.
Fearing the loss of face that comes with having to attempt the seal-splitting twice, I have become accustomed to combining the dropping of the bottle with the forcing of the seal. That additional momentum, that impact, does indeed seal the deal. And last week it broke everything.
Do what I write, not what I do. Perhaps there’s sense in puncturing the central seal very slightly before starting to toss the Highland caber. But this is just a guess. I’ll update you on this if I’m ever given the chance to try again.
Now the machine is replaced, I’ve had the chance to open it up and see its internals better. It’s an insulated metal tank that heats the water. And that’s the reason why my tea is still tasting really bad. 1 week in, that metallic taste is still there.
I guess that means we’re drinking a little metal every time we pour from the red side, as well as the microplastics we doubtless get from the bottle itself and from the pipes on the blue side. And that’s bad news.
The good news is that a well-used tin water tank eventually stops releasing so much tin that it tastes like tin. That’s cause for hope.
The trick is to break them in without breaking them completely.
Don’t trust me with this. Don’t even trust me to puncture your milk-tea lid.
