Thinking Outside the Flood by Alexander

Thinking Outside the Flood by Alexander - October 2018 Scholarship Essay

The slow trickle of the water in the kitchen cascaded into a flood. The combination of rust and one too many accidental smacks by a mop handel had finally created the jagged piece of metal that now hung under the dishwasher and gushed out water. As the water began to flood the kitchen of Still Water Valley Golf Course, my coworker, who was in charge of the kitchen, began her cries for help and desperately tried to fix the pipe with the help of some of the patrons, none of whom had any experience in the plumbing business. This commotion caused eighteen year old me with even less plumbing experience than any of the people upstairs to rush up and see what the commotion was about. As I took my first steps into the kitchen, I felt water soak into my socks as the kitchen was now covered in a thin layer of the odorless, clear liquid. My coworker looked frantically at me and asked what to do. This had never happened before, but I asked to look at the problem just to give it the old college try.
Upon inspection, I thought of something my dad had once told me: It’s more important to understand what the part is doing than to know what the part is. Noting that problem was just an issue of the water travelling seven inches horizontally while gravity replaced the need of the pump, I thought of what the broken part did. This piece merely kept the water in the pipe. In my coworkers eyes I rushed out of the kitchen without a clue, but the reality was that I was heading to the dumpster. Two days prior I had been instructed to throw away an old hose, and I put it straight into the dumpster. The cold autumn air whipped at my soaked feet, but I felt no chill as I approached the dumpster and feared that they had taken out the trash earlier that week. Luckily they did not, and as I carried the large hose back to the downstairs garage, the gears in my brain started to turn. I used a sharp tool to cut a solid part of the hose into a nine inch pathway and grabbed two strong copper wires. When I returned back upstairs a I saw buckets filled to the brim with water as a futile attempt to stop the flood. I went back under the dishwasher, but this time I slipped each end open end of the hose over the broken metal pipe. Next, with the help of the men in the dining area, we were able to securely wrap the copper wire around the ends of hose. With these tightly secured we held and our breath and cheered at the water stopped its barrage against the kitchen floor.
While the fix wasn’t permanent, it did last the two days it took for a plumber to look at the pipe and order its replacement. My ingenuity saved the golf course hundreds in potential damage and this is what thinking outside the box means to me. The solution to the problem is not always apparent and easy, but one problem creates millions of possible solutions. The goal of people who are constantly trying to think outside of the box is to find not only the most unique methods, but also the equally effectual method. I believe that this is what it means to think outside the box and in my experience creative thinking such as this is a powerful skill.