A hot water tank doesn’t seem to be something that should break that often. It’s got one job: hold hot water.

As I’ve recently learned, however, hot water tanks are a lot like bulldogs. You’re happy if they last 12 years, although you may have to deal with some leaking toward the end.

Last week, my hot water tank started leaking. A lot. Which is the type of thing that happens when I start feeling a little manly.

I grew up in a house where my dad fixed everything. I can’t recall a time when he ever took his cars to the mechanic, but I do remember plenty of long, cold nights holding a flashlight for him while he worked under the car, talking about the things every man should have.

One of those things was a bucket full of fittings. My dad’s got shelves full of buckets and coffee cans that are LOADED with loose fittings and bolts and random tiny screws. Any time something would need to be fixed, my dad would go to the basement and start dumping buckets all over the ground. It’d be our job to look for this – and he’d give us a screw that looked like every other screw. These searches had about a 5% success rate, but that’s why you always need more buckets.

Anyways, when something breaks in my house, I am reminded again that I don’t have any buckets full of fittings and bolts. I am not a man yet.

Unlike my dad, I do not fix everything myself, because when I try, I tend to make things much worse. So when my hot water tank broke, my first call wasn’t to my father, because I didn’t really want to be involved in the process. I called my father-in-law, who is one of those people who always “knows a guy.”

While my father-in-law put in a couple calls on my behalf, my wife and I went to my parents for the traditional Sunday Night Brady Homemade Pizza Dinner. My dad remarked several times how easy the installation would be, then my father-in-law called back. Nobody he called could do it, but there was this one guy at the fire station who could maybe help later in the week, or a buddy who might know someone who knows a guy…Things were not looking great.

My wife, Deserae, came back to the room where I had been talking on the phone. “Your dad will help. He’s just waiting for you to ask him.”

“But there’s this fireman who maybe has time later…”

Clenched teeth now. “Just. Ask him.”

I popped my head back into the living room. “Hey Dad, do you think you could help install the water heater?”

“Sure!”

The next night, he arrived at my house with a giant bucket of fittings.

We went to Lowe’s (Never Stop Improving!), picked up the water tank and attempted to load it into my parents’ van. That’s when it became clear that my dad and I have very different philosophies about how to get things done.

DAD: “Before we put it in, let’s figure out how to do this. There’s a side that needs to go up. That’s important. And we’ll need to maybe take those seats out. Let me find my measuring tape.”

DUSTIN: “Can we just try to stuff it in?”

This continued when we got the tank home.

DAD: “We need to decide who should go in front. That person will have a heavier load, but the back is actually the tougher job. Is the path to the basement clear?”

DUSTIN: “This’ll just slide down the steps by itself, right?”

And started installation.

DAD: “When you’re shutting off these tough valves, you’ve got to use two wrenches working against each other. Otherwise, you’ll break it and have a huge mess on your hands.”

DUSTIN: Stops putting all his weight onto a lever that won’t move.

We finally got the old tank out of the way, and the moment arrived that I had been dreading all night. My dad grabbed a fitting from the old pipe, then dumped the contents of his bucket onto the ground and said, “Find something that looks like this.”

It was not there. My dad was afraid of that – you can never have too many fittings.

As we went back to Lowe’s to buy the fitting, he continued talking about the things we needed. I understood about 20 percent of the words coming out of his mouth. At one point, for example, he talked about how we had to buy a nipple for the pipe. That’s one of the words I felt like I understood. A baby bottle has a nipple, I have two, etc. I was disappointed to learn that a pipe nipple is another type of nipple entirely.

A baby bottle nipple is not the same as a pipe nipple.

This continued as we installed the tank. My dad offered some great advice about plumber’s tape, pipe wrenches and thermocouples. Unfortunately, I cannot share any of it here, because I have no idea what was going on.

I should also pause to clear up some misleading language I’ve been using. My use of the pronoun “we” throughout this story grossly misrepresents my participation in the night’s events. My involvement was, in fact, 98 percent watching my dad do things I can only describe as “magic.” Here’s a full list of the tasks I DID do:

8:21 Search for a fitting that looks like “this.” Fail.
8:43 Turn on the ShopVac for 20 seconds. Success.
9:36 Use the flashlight function on my phone. My proudest moment of the night.
10:15 Drill a single hole in the duct. Break the drill bit.
11:02 Turn on all the faucets in the house.

Turning on all the faucets was the last step in the process – “we” had successfully installed a water tank!

But if there’s one thing I know about home repair projects, it’s that they are not allowed to end before midnight. So I was not shocked to learn about a surprise final final step, which was testing for gas leaks with soapy water. Nor was I shocked to find that the newly installed pipe was leaking gas at an alarming rate.

I watched my dad undo most of his hard work for the night, reassemble the gas line a different way and test it again. A tiny leak this time. He did it again. Same result.

While he took everything apart a third time, I silently performed the following Google search on my phone:

If you are wondering, it is apparently NOT OK to have a small gas leak. But it didn’t matter because, as they always say, fourth time’s the charm. By 12:45 a.m., I had a brand new non-leaking hot water tank. I helped my dad pack up his bucket, thanked him and stumbled up to bed.

Ever since we installed the hot water tank, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it takes to be a man. And after giving it some thought, I’d have to say that my dad is the manliest person I know. He knows everything there is to know about thermocouples and lawn mowers, but unfortunately, he’s not going to be around forever. That’s why I truly hope somewhere in my dad’s will is a line leaving all his buckets of bolts to his firstborn.

By that time, I hope I’ll finally be ready to be a man.

LIFE LESSON #4

Every man needs a bucket of bolts.