“You don’t know what you don’t know.”
- Socrates
Boy oh boy, was I ever mad at myself the other day…for not knowing something that, in hindsight, was pretty darn obvious.
Or was it?
If you happen to have an underground irrigation system in your yard—or are familiar with irrigation systems—then you will know just how silly (and angry) I feel about what went down on the weekend.
However, if (like me), you don’t have any knowledge of underground irrigation systems whatsoever, then you might not think I’m a total idiot.
Where I live (on Vancouver Island), there is very little rain in the summer. It is pretty much drought conditions for June, July and August…so manually watering my garden gets exhausting. So last year, I finally took the financial plunge and had an underground drip irrigation system installed. The lawn still dies ever summer but at least my garden beds are watered.
Or rather, I thought they were being watered for the past two months. I mean, I kept checking the irrigation control panel on the side of my house to make sure the system was working properly. It was programmed to run for half an hour every second morning. So during the time it was supposed to be running, I would look at the panel and yup, the tiny sprinkler icon was there.
But the garden beds themselves sure looked dry to me. And the plants didn’t seem to be doing very well either. So I had started manually hand-watering some of the plants with the hose…just to supplement the underground drip irrigation system.
Why I didn’t actually dig down into the garden and see if there was, in fact, any water dripping out of the irrigation pipe, I don’t know. I guess I was too busy hand-watering my plants.
But then, on the weekend, my cousin, Matt, came to visit and I talked to him about the issue. He looked at the irrigation panel on the side of the house and nodded, “Yup, it’s working.”
“Then why is my garden so dry?” I say. “I swear something is wonky.”
Matt thought a minute. “The master valve is turned on, isn’t it?”
“The what?”
“The master valve?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s the valve that needs to be open for the water to get into your irrigation system.”
I blinked at this brilliant tidbit of intel. “And where would that master valve be?” I asked.
He looked at me like I had horns coming out of my head. “Wherever it is that the irrigation system is hooked up to the water source. There should be a panel on the ground in your yard somewhere.”
I racked my brain a moment, then proudly led him to a panel in the far corner of my front lot. I pointed down at the panel. “I think that might be what you’re talking about.”
He nodded, dropped to his knees and popped up the panel. “Yup,” he says. “There’s your master valve…and it’s in the ‘off’ position.”
“WHAT?!”
I watched him calmly turn the valve to the ‘on’ position, then put the panel lid back on. Then he stood up and looked at me, smiling. He didn’t want to say the obvious, so I did.
“So…you’re telling me that my irrigation system has not been working this entire summer?”
“Correct. Whoever did the blowout of the lines last fall would have turned the master valve off for the winter.”
I sighed. “Then why did the little sprinkler icon indicate that the system was, in fact, watering my garden ever second morning?”
Matt shrugged. “Because as far as the program was concerned, it WAS watering. The irrigation system itself is working fine. It can’t tell whether there’s actually any water in the pipes or not. It just opens and closes the small valves to the individual pipes.”
I folded my arms over my chest. “And why, pray tell, would the guys who installed my irrigation system not TELL me that I needed to turn on the master valve in the spring?”
Matt shrugged.
“I feel like an idiot,” I said. “I guess I should have known about the master valve.”
“No. Don’t feel bad,” said Matt, shaking his head. “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
Very true. And quite frankly, the irrigation guys should have mentioned this very obvious-to-them-but-how-the-heck-would-I-know fact about home irrigation systems.
So my questions to you are:
#1. Might there be an important piece of information that you don’t know you don’t know – about something that isn’t working in your life?
#2. Could there be a master valve somewhere that needs to be turned on…in order to get things flowing again?
#3. Are you so busy doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result—instead of taking a moment and asking yourself why something clearly isn’t working?
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