I always got perfect attendance awards at school. I cannot remember EVER missing a day. But I must have missed at least one day because to quote Dave Barry " I must have been absent the day they took all the boys out of class and taught them how mechanical things work so they could fix anything and everthing".
I got Peggy a Vitamix for Christmas. I did this so she could make brown and green juices that make me vomit, but make her extremely happy. Just three days into her blissful healthy eating good ole' lefty Peggy (the woman who cannot open any cellophane package without destroying it and the bag it came in) got the lid (don't ask me how, it should not be possible) stuck in the teeth of the blender and rendered it in-operable. This put me in my least favorite role of Mr. Fix-it.
Luckily I discovered that there was a little part that was designed to fail and thus keep the expensive motor from hurting itself. This little ($16.00) part attached to the square revolving nut that comes off the motor that is made out of soft, almost hockey puck rubber had literally dissolved itself. One quick call to Amazon had this little baby on its way to us.
On Friday it arrived. Mr. Fix-it attempted to put the new thingee (my technical word for the part) back in and that is when other things began to deteriorate.
The original thingee had kinda melted over the post. Melted and reformed to make putting the new thingee on difficult. I tried all the things one should not do. I tried a butter knife, my pocket knife and screw drivers (both fillips head and regular....with no luck. Then I had a brilliantly bad idea. I have this little drivel thing. Kind of like a dentist tool only bigger and certainly not as sanitary. I gleefully pulled out this little used (impulse buy) tool and started to play dentist on the square nut. After accidentally gouging the cover plate and perhaps the little green thingee that I was not sure just what it did, why it was there and just how big a deal could it be.
I also discovered, by burning the ever-loving shit out of my finger, just how hot the end of the drivel bit can get.
Like all home improvement projects I soon ran out of swear words, patience and hair brained- bad-for-the-part-I-am-trying-fix ideas and gave up. I vowed to bring it into the shop and have a smart guy look at the problem. Not as easy as it sounds.
This requires bringing the part in, begging one of the foreman to look at it, trying to explain what "I" think the problem is and getting laughed at, ridiculed and treated kind of like the skinny guy in the old Charles Atlas add that I am featuring in this post.
So on the one hand, I always have a great place filled with people who can do anything, but boy does my ego pay a price for this service.
But whenever Peggy breaks something I still have three brain cells left (the same ones that get excited every June prior to the big league draft) that think that this time I can become THE HERO OF THE BEACH!
1 comment:
Just so you know, the thingee is called a drive socket. And if anyone wants to know how I managed to break this expensive appliance, I'm germinating a blog entry on the subject, structured around my one and only life resolution, which is to learn to be mindful. By mindful, I mean focusing all of my attention on what I am doing WHENEVER WHAT I AM DOING INVOLVES APPLIANCES THAT COST SEVERAL HUNDRED DOLLARS AND REQUIRE A HUMAN OPERATOR. If I were married to the guy kicking sand in the weakling's face at the beach, I would not have to be mindful. I could be mindless. But who wants to go through life that way?
Post a Comment