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| 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?
