The Lost Contact Lens

I believe it is advisable to hang on to as much money as you can for retirement. With this precept in mind, I worked hard at saving money this morning.

Unfortunately I made the mistake of passing the mirror as I was getting ready to go to the park. What a fright! I looked like a myopic chicken. At least, I told myself, put your contact lenses in. So I went to the bathroom, and who should follow me but Miss Mouth, Simone the whippet, who likes to whine whenever I am there. I was just rinsing my right lens in the washbasin with the stopper that has never worked properly, when Simone gave a particularly annoying whine. I turned around to tell her to zip it, and--bam--my right lens went straight down the plughole. Ha! Losing a bifocal gas permeable lens is not like losing a soft lens. I was probably looking at a couple of hundred dollars down the drain.

Knowing next to nothing about plumbing, I had heard of a sink trap and suspected that the lens was lurking in there, stuck in a melange of grease and hair. If only I could get to it, I could possibly save all that money, and avoid having to appear before the world in thick spectacles for a couple of days. In the park I ran into my friend T, who is great at fixing things, and asked her if she had a pipe wrench I could borrow. She kindly dropped off a couple of same on her way to work.

I cleared out the stuff in the cupboard under the sink and got cracking. Exerting all the strength of my highly toned biceps, I cracked a nut into three pieces while undoing the j-bend. No matter, I thought. A trickle of water fell into the bowl I had carefully placed beneath the pipe. There it was! My lens, as good as new!
I cleaned the precious little thing and placed it back in its case, then went to Greschlers plumbing supply at the end of my block for a replacement sink trap. It cost $14.63. I went back to work in the narrow cupboard under the sink.

Using all my patience and reading the directions over and over for forty minutes I am still not able to figure out how this thing is supposed to fit together without yanking the pipe out of the wall. So let's see--pay the plumber or call the optician next time. Which will it be?
Simone says she's very sorry.