 |
| www.telegraph.co.uk |
I’m not sure if we’ve been over this or not, but I’m not a
handy person. What I am is a stubborn person who will avoid asking for help
long past the point when basic common sense would indicate it to be the proper
course. Occasionally this stubbornness will result in me eventually fixing
something around the house, probably in double or triple the amount of time it
would have taken someone who knew what they were doing to fix. The rest of the
time I either end up breaking something or learning to live with it in its
un-fixed. When I’m successful, an outsider may think: “Hey, you fixed that! Way
to go, Tool Man!” But to anyone in the know, the reaction would be more along
the lines of Col. Kurtz at the end of “Heart of Darkness.” “It took you how
long? To do what now? The horror. The horror.”
Case in point: My recent battle
with a loose bathroom doorknob. Peter Jackson himself could not have concocted
something more epically over-wrought.
So yeah, the knob on my bathroom
door has been getting looser over the last several months. I’d say the primary
cause of this is my one cat who insists on continually rubbing his head on the
door, which in turn drives the door – and the door knob – back against the tile
wall at a decent rate of speed. Repeat that process several thousand times and
you get a door knob that’s pretty well ready to fall off.
Every so often, I’d notice it and
give a half-hearted attempted to fix it. I’d grab each side by the base and
sort of twist them in opposite directions, my intention being to tighten it
that way. I had no idea if this was the proper way to fix it or not, but what
the hell?
Now, why didn’t I just tighten it
with a screw driver? It’s one of those weird ones with the hidden screws, but
good question. I’m glad we could get that cleared up early.
After weeks of me doing that and
weeks of nothing really getting better, my fiancée said something to the effect
of “Huh, looks like the doorknob is broken” this past weekend. That was it.
Just a simple observation. However, as is convention, when someone says
something’s broken around you, as a man with even a smattering of facial hair, you
are obligated to give it a proper look-see. No longer will half-assed twisting
be accepted.
I postponed the run I was about to
go for, dug out a screwdriver and headed to the bathroom.
My first thought: “Let me twist
this sucker back into place.” For some reason I was convinced that was the
solution and I just hadn’t been putting enough elbow grease into it. Several
moments passed. The doorknob was still loose and I’d broken into a sweat. It
was roughly 113 degrees on Saturday in my part of the world. Factor in the
humidity and the temperature was easily pushing the 200s.
I gave it one last good twist … and
then the whole thing fell apart. The back half came off of the front half. I
wasn’t terrified. I saw this as progress. I spent several minutes working out
how to reassemble it on my lap, without that pesky door involved. Turns out, I was
right. All you had to do was Chuck Berry it back together. I assembled it and disassembled
it a few times and then decided I was ready for the show. I went to put it back
on the door knob.
Nothing.
Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20
minutes of fruitless trying later, I went and got my cell phone. I went to
Youtube. I opened a video put out by the doorknob’s maker. A few minutes in, it
seemed to confirm my twisting hypothesis. I wasn’t sure why twisting it
together on my lap work, but doing so on the door didn’t.
With renewed vigor, I exited out of
the still playing video and attacked the door once again. Many more minutes
went by. I was soaked through like a man attempting to disarm a bomb. Eventually,
something clicked and the thing held. I was victorious. I was also exhausted. I
went for my run, but instead of my planned eight miles, I did five. The heat
had bested me, but I had bested the doorknob.
At least I had until the next day.
I went in to the bathroom to take a shower and the whole thing once again fell
apart. I sat down on the toilet in defeat. I opened the manufacturer’s video on
my phone to try to uncover what I’d done wrong. I watched the whole thing.
Turns out, there were many, many steps involved in the process of assembling that
type of door knob and that twisting with all your might was a not effective
strategy.
Upon the conclusion of the video, I
followed the steps as they’d been laid out for me. I won. For reals that time.
It’s important to note, turning to the manufacturer’s video wasn’t me asking
for help. No more than utilizing my car’s owner’s manual to help me change
things is asking for help. It’s simply leveraging the non-human resources at my
disposal to help me solve a problem. The key, of course, being non-human.
No comments:
Post a Comment