I have a painful admission to make,
though one that will come as no surprise to people who know me. I am
not very handy. There, I said it! It hurts, but it is true.
When something around the house breaks
or is otherwise functioning in a way contrary to how it was meant to
function, I instinctively shy away: A heater that sits cold, a fan
that doesn't spin, a roof that doesn't dissuade water, or a water
pipe that works just like the roof, the results are consistent and
predictable. My first inclination is to gather together my
belongings, and find somewhere new to move so I don't have to deal
with it.
So acutely aware of how unhandy I am
that I even have dreams about this sort of thing. I once had a
nightmare in which, no sooner had I moved into a new house that I
discovered that, unlike what was advertised in the glossy brochure,
the blamed place had no electricity! After being a man and dutifully
checking each and every switch with a new light bulb and each and
every plug with a “My Little Pony” curling iron (not mine!), I
had been ready to vacate the premises. But then, in one sickening
moment, my wife threw a breaker switch and the whole house sprang to
life! I was so bemusedly chastened that I forgot all about that
ridiculous curling iron, which ended up burning a hole in the carpet
upstairs where I had left it plugged in.
Okay, the dream was actually fictional
(especially the My Little Pony bit. It's not plagiarism, though, so
leave me alone). However, it encapsulates several real realities for
me (as opposed to... fake realities, I guess). First, a technical or
handy challenge raises its head to leer mockingly in my general
direction. Secondly, I either begin to attempt to address it, or
avoid doing so out of trepidation. And finally, the Third step
always plays out in one of two ways. 1) My wife leaps in like she
invented kryptonite,
knocks me to the side before I can hurt myself, and re-builds the
entire offending wing of the house with none other than duct tape and
scraps of baling twine before I've even figured out the actual
problem. OR 2) She beats me to the punch on the obvious, face-palm
smacking solution, which once again leaves me wondering just what my
own meager brain is actually good for.
That, in a nutshell, tends to sum up my
“handy” life. However, thankfully, there are times when fortune
smiles upon me and I can serve a functional purpose. This either
means that I got lucky, or a job arises that requires more than one
person so my wife cannot do it by herself. Such a time occurred
recently when we attempted to move our internet service's base of
operations to a different part of the house.
Now, I have no illusions as to my
abilities, but I can say unreservedly that even I could not mess up
as much as the idiot who built most of this house! In one period of
complete (and I would say with the assistance of too many regulated
substances) insanity, someone once turned this house upside down. He
added a second floor, and, in so doing managed to get nearly
everything related to electrical and plumbing, insulation and
roofing, absolutely dead wrong! Over the past decade and a half,
subsequent owners have pecked away at the problems as best they
could, pulling out wiring that goes nowhere, covering plumbing that's
completely exposed to the elements, and trying to keep entire parts
of the house from becoming additional swimming pools. I don't care
how romantic it sounds, a second story miniature Venice is simply not
cool.
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| Octopus strand, labeled! |
But back to the cable wiring. There
are no fewer than two cable 'hubs' in the house. Unfortunately, none
of the actual cables to the different rooms are actually labeled, and
most are not connected. They're just clumped together in a dizzying,
octopus-like array. Some rooms have more than one cable conduit,
while other unexpected places (like the bathroom) also got special
treatment. The job of finding which of the million cables went to
the room we desired to have the modem and router required TWO people!
(At last, oh sweet triumph!) I went from room to room with the
modem, plugging it into the cable there, while my wife would connect
each strand of the octopus to the hot wire until we got a signal. In
this manner, I was able to serve a function, and we were able to
label the entire house!
Well, I should say, NEARLY the entire
house. Of all the strands of both octopi, guess which single room
did not have a member? Yup, the only room we actually needed a cable
to go to. So, a bittersweet victory for the time being. Still, I
will remember fondly the time that I was able to help make technical
sense of our hopelessly dysfunctional house.
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