The spider did it.

Just another day. I unlocked Ian’s place coming back from Tobie’s afternoon walkie, took the leash off, grabbed a beer from the fridge and took a slug while making my way to the dark musty bowels of the cave. Time to check the water infrastructure before stripping down for my shower.

I checked the water softener display, which is when I met this KAIJU living under the lid…

You’d think I’d be used to this by now. The high desert is home to approximately all the spiders, and most of them don’t particularly freak me out. But I hate it when a big one sneaks up on me, y’know? Anyway, during the ensuing struggle to the death the water softener’s lid may have, um, accidentally contacted the control panel just a little.

I didn’t give it much thought at the time. I mean, other than expostulating over “the size of that thing,” there was nothing much to be said. Just another day.

But it’s the things you don’t know that get you. And what I didn’t know was that it wasn’t just necessary for that control panel to be intact and fully plugged in: It also had to be locked in a very specific position over this weird primitive mechanical wheel that controlled the operation of the backwash gear. And yesterday, a few days after the spider incident, I noticed that the regular scheduled backwash hadn’t happened. So I started one manually – and got an error message.

Hm.

Dug out the manual. Which told me to … check the control panel position? What the hell difference could that make?

Turned out to make all the difference, which was kind of weird but whatever. My job is to keep the stuff running, not to have an opinion about how it runs.

Hey. Watch your language around me or I’ll swat you again.