Tea Tech Fail

One morning last week was a comedy of errors.  I got a little behind in the routine -- this is what I get for emptying out the dishwasher, I think.  I realized that I should have made my mid-morning thermos of tea, and started the water boiling just in time to have the tea ready.  I love my thermos; it can keep a whole lot of tea warm for up to about eight hours.  And its stopcock is super -- click it open and tea pours out; click it closed and the heat stays in.  

I was about to pour the tea into my thermos, when I managed to drop the stopcock for it.  It hit the floor at the right velocity and angle to burst into pieces.  I suspect that it's designed to be modular for ease of cleaning.  I gathered the scattered plastic:  The black outer ring that screws into the thermos's neck, a black axel with a jaggy coat-tree top, and a white crown gear which is part of the click.  I should be walking out the door, but instead I'm looking around for a spring which I think should be allowing the jaggy axel to push up against the crown gear -- ballpoint pens have springs, and without them the pens wont click, so my thermos uses the same mechanism.

I get down on my hands and knees looking for the spring, but I cant find it.  It's not with the crumbs under the kitchen table, or any of the chairs.  It's not under the cabinets.  It's not under the fridge.  I look some more.  For ten minutes, all the time aware that I'm getting later and later and I've got a bunch of brewed tea and no way to take it to work.  Flustered, the fall-back action is to take fresh dry loose leaf tea to work and brew it there. 

After work, I come home and go out on the deck.  It's possible the spring jumped out onto the deck and rolled between a crack.  So I look under the deck.  Which involves a lot of limbo-wiggling through dry, pokey dirt.  It isn't there. 

Dejectedly, I put the stopcock together without the spring to see just how broken it was.  

Click-click.  And. It. Works.  Click-click.  I test it a few times and it continues to work.

I'm sure there's a metaphor in there, somewhere.