Last night, after the guys left bible study here, I thought to myself, “since I don’t have anything else to do, I should finish routing networking cable through my house.” And as I was doing that, I noticed that a leg on a coffee table had broken off, so I spent some time fixing that. And then I thought that as long as I had my tools out I may as well fix the cabinet doors on my TV stand that I’d been meaning to fix for months. And before I knew it, it was 2AM. Are there programs that help people like me?
Some of you may already know this about me, but what I say in the profile column to the left is true. I really, really enjoy fixing things. This may qualifiy me as the biggest dweeb around, but I don’t care. The feeling of accomplishment that I get when something that wasn’t working before or was damaged gets repaired is like a drug to me sometimes. Granted, sometimes I procrastinate and sometimes I only half-way finish the job… but that’s more because I lose interest in the project. Ever since I was a little kid, I loved taking things apart and putting them back together. More often it was taking things apart than putting it back together… much to the displeasure of my parents. But I got better. I remember when I was 8, I fixed the light switch in my room. I don’t really remember how I did it, but I do remember getting a jolt of electricity accidentally, and (this tells you how much TV I watched) I thought that I would adopt super powers.
Well, maybe I did get some sort of super power… because I’ve noticed that sometimes when people ask me to fix things, they just somehow start working when I turn it on. At Jane’s house-warming, she asked me to look at her TV that wouldn’t turn on. I had really no idea what to do to fix it but decided that looking at it wouldn’t hurt. So I plugged it in, turned the power on, and it worked. I joked with her about possibly not having plugged it in, but she assured me that she had tried everything to no avail up to that point. Just this past weekend I went to our youth group pastor’s house. As I walked up to the front door, I noticed he was fiddling around with his wireless doorbell. He didn’t know why it wasn’t ringing. I asked to look at it, checked the batteries, and pressed the button… and lo and behold… you guessed it. Ketchup came squirting out of it. I’m kidding… it rang.
I especially like it if I fix something in an unconventional way… or just using random things around the house. It makes me feel like the professor on Gilligan’s Island. Here’s a list of some of them…
- Electronic Keyboard – using pencil lead and masking tape
- LED flashlight – using spit
- Coffee table leg – using toothpicks and screwdriver
- Car Tape Player – using a rubber band
- A Key Fob Remote – using aluminum foil
- A transistor radio – using coconuts, a clam shell and.. oh wait, that was Gilligan’s Island…
super powers … hahahaha.