Etruscans: 1 Gardenia: 0

Okay, so here's the update. I took the faucet back to Home Depot and showed it to the first guy I saw in the plumbing aisle. He remembered me from the last time I was there ... or more likely, he remembered the faucet ... and went to find another guy, Andre, who I had also met before. Andre took one look at my faucet and the mutilated hoses and said "What the heck have you been doing?"

It turns out that Manny gave me the wrong connectors. He gave me a female to female compression nipple (I SWEAR that's what it's called) but unfortunately I needed a female to female ... something else nipple. IU? UI? Some acronym that means do not try to screw a compression threaded piece in here. Well as you can imagine, I put quite a bit of thrust into trying to get the pieces connected yesterday, and now it turns out that I probably stripped the faucet.

(Jeez, stripping and thrust and nipples and female to female connectors ... but I digress.)

Andre helped me out and talked to the manager, so I think that Home Depot is going to replace my faucet, but what a PAIN in the BUTT this has turned out to be.

But here's the thing. I said that I needed a man for the screwing, BUT if the first man I talked to had given me the right advice, I would have been able to do it myself. However, Andre was very helpful, and also not bad looking, so perhaps there's something to be said for the damsel in distress.

It's all in a name.

I learned that faucet handles are called escutcheons, but I keep geting escutcheons confused with Etruscans. So as I'm fiddling with the chase that I'm building (it's built, looks like crap, but it's built) I keep thinking "Where do the Etruscans go?" This is surely not the question I should be contemplating.

I wasn't even sure what, or who, Etruscans were until I looked them up on answers.com. Here's my favorite quote from the entry:

• The Etruscan language also presents difficulties to the scholar. It can be easily read (the alphabet is of Greek extraction, and the sound value of the signs is known), but, with the exception of only a few words, the vocabulary is not understood.

I'll bet an Etruscan could help me with my hoses. The problem is, how would I ask him?

Okay, I finally found one good reason to say I NEED a man.

Plumbing.

Actually, it's not the plumbing part that's the problem. It's the screwing.

I tried to turn my faucet on today (I finally connected the drain with a series of j-bends, p-traps and sawed-off plastic pipe) and water spurted EVERYWHERE. This is not a good thing. The water is spurting everywhere because the female to female connector that I'm using is not tight enough.

I screwed it in as far as I could, which seemed to be about halfway. I thought to myself "well, that's as tight as it goes" and bravely turned on the faucet. Apparently, that's not as tight as it goes. Which is the first legitmate reason I can think of that I need a man. I mean, I suppose I could find a woman who is stronger than me and could tighten the hoses all the way, but lets face it, I'm not that likely to find a woman who's stronger than me!

(Okay, let's face it for real: I'd rather ask a man for help with the screwing. Screwing of the hoses! What were you thinking?)