Stuck lid, a lot of ideas and crowdsourcing

Oh it was such fun adventure yesterday! It all started Wednesday night! I was clearing the sink of dishes - either to dishwasher and washing the pots and pans. As I was in the act of loading the dishwasher, I saw that the coffee filter lid (of the steel coffee filter) was on the move. I thought I had a few extra seconds. But nope it slid into the sink drain and got comfortable. It fit perfectly, the grooves matched the grooves of the drain. It was happy. We were not. I used a butter knife. But the water that was trying to drain helped it only get better settled.

Following morning, I tried:

• hot water - to realise that would only expand it, right?! So, it didn't work.


• wanted to try ice - alas our ice box was empty


• Put some oil in the sides - didn't work.


• Tried the plunger - but that only made it worse?


• Got the vacuum cleaner out, didn't work.

So, I took the problem to my family circle for entertainment and posted on FB for help and got:

• Use an ax - we umm didn't have an ax (camping ax neither) at home. We did try a drill to drill a hole but then realised, right not a mason jar top a SOLID stainless steel. And of course, the drill ran out of battery


• Inform management and let them deal with it - perks of renting, their equipment they handle it so we don't damage it in our experiments. Well, some strange reason none of them showed up!


• magnet - we didn't have a strong enough magnet at home.


• Super Glue multiple twines/wires to the inner lid surface and yank them all together - very creative and would love to give it a try but we didn't know where we hid the super glue safely from our 6 year old!


• Unscrew the pipe and push it out - we didn't want to do that and figured that's what the management/maintenance staff would have to do.


• Use Jedi powers - well. yes. of course.


• Apple cider - all I had was apple cider vinegar

So, guess which one did the trick?

( answer behind the cut )

But there it is. It felt good and we had such fun! A little relief from the work piled up!