we all wear a lot of hats

It's hard to pick just one thing

Like everyone else, when I meet someone new, I get asked: “What do you do?”

I’ve come to kind of hate the question. My default answer has turned into a joking, “Welllll, it just depends on the day of the week.” I tell them I’m a stay-at-home dad, or a bus driver, or a photographer, or a farm manager—depending on how I’m feeling at the moment.

The reason I’ve come to dislike that question is that I feel like I’m being asked to distill my entire self down into a single, easy-to-digest identity based on the job I have. Which is fine, really. I get it. Wouldn't it be a pain if everyone told everyone else their entire life story with every new hand they shook? But it still feels a little deceptive to tell someone that I'm a bus driver and let them think that’s my defining characteristic, just because I drive a big yellow cheese wagon filled with middle schoolers five days a week.

I think today, I will be an electrician, because the water heater isn't working again.

I was a plumber the other day. I had the inlet pulled apart to find it clogged a good bit. I don't know about yours, but on ours, there's a little plastic thingy shaped like a sphere with a cone attached to it that sits at the top of the heater. It's designed so that cold water can flow in, but once it's heated up, it won't flow out the wrong way. The rising hot water pushes the cone and sphere into the pipe and shuts down the flow, but when water is needed again, the cold water pushes it back out of the way.

The short of it is that there's a bit of moving plastic in the water heater that got clogged shut after some dirt was wedged in where it wasn't supposed to be.

That problem took the better part of a day to figure out and fix. Now, fast forward a few weeks, and we're getting plenty of water flowing out the hot water faucet—but no hot water. That means it's not a mechanical problem like the one before, but an electrical one. I tested the elements and they're fine, but when I put my probes on the power to the water heater, I'm not getting the right voltage.

Okay, no big deal. Maybe a breaker popped. Except I can't find the breaker, because they were mislabeled.

And standing there in the dark with a flashlight and a multimeter, staring at a panel full of scratches and wrong words, it hits me. This breaker box isn’t all that different from that question I hate. We slap these little sticky notes on people—“Bus Driver,” “Photographer,” “Farm Manager”—and assume that tells us where the power comes from. But half the time, the labels are wrong, or at least incomplete. You can flip the switch marked “Bus Driver,” but you might accidentally turn off the lights in the “Photographer” room.

The point is, whether it’s a water heater or a human being, you usually have to dig a little deeper than the label to figure out what’s actually going on inside.