Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again next time.
~~H. L. Mencken
I had intended to fill this space with news of progress made toward our move to Vietnam and enrollment in a CELTA course, but I find I must digress somewhat. In fact, the whole scheme to study and then teach in Vietnam has come seriously a cropper. In consequence, my wife, Kathryn, and I now are looking at a different country altogether as a landing spot. I am not naming it in case our plans change again before we go. You see, we want to appear to know what we’re doing, and this façade is harder to maintain when we keep switching our intended destination every two weeks.
So instead of a move update, I will use this space to dispel the myth that our preparations are just one long, joyful round of filling out training-course applications and researching exotic diseases we might contract. No, there is a lot of actual work involved in this relocation lark as well. We did some of it this past weekend, as a matter of fact.
I have always loathed home-improvement projects (or DIY, as it is sometimes known) because mine almost never actually improve the home, they routinely cost three times our initial estimates (usually because I need to buy an essential tool halfway through), and I unfailingly acquire several small but painful wounds along the way.
This weekend it was hanging shower doors, and the project unfolded in typical fashion. We bought the doors a few weeks ago at Home Depot, left phone messages for half a dozen alleged carpenters and handymen, waited whimsically for a call back, then said “to hell with it” and girded our loins to put the doors up ourselves.
I can only guess that instructions are included with things like our shower doors because federal regulation says they must be there. But really, they are worse than superfluous; they’re actually a kind of sarcasm. People who already know how to install shower doors don’t need instructions, and the rest of us find little enlightenment or comfort in pamphlets that evidently are word-for-word translations from Tagalog. For home-improvers like me, the instructions might as well say, “Look at you. Why, it’s obvious to Lincoln’s dead grandmother that you never held a Dremel tool in your life. What a mess you’re going to make with that! Be a sport and send us photos when you’re done.”
But before I got my hands on the Dremel tool (lent to us by a neighbor, who meant well), I had a lot of time to think because I was using a hand file to shape the doors’ base plate to our tub. At first, of course, I merely thought of how much I hate such projects, but then I slipped into a kind of filing-induced meditation and worked out exactly why I have such poor success with DIY and despise it so.
When I was very young there was a particular toy that held me enthralled. It was an H-shaped wooden structure with quarter-sized holes bored in the crosspiece. There were fat round pegs that fit through the holes, but only just. The fun was to use the small wooden mallet that came with the set to hammer the pegs through the holes over and over again. The pieces all were painted bright colors; probably there was a similar hammering set in your own childhood.
The point is that I took seriously my job of whacking the pegs through their holes; I kept at it for long periods, and I got pretty good at it. This is precisely where DIY projects fall short of what our childhood activities led us to expect from a world we were told was rational: in the kits you buy, there is one and only one copy of each essential part, and you get no practice swings at all before you have to put it to its intended use. What folly! You’ve never used or installed one of these things before, yet you must get it exactly right, or guests to your home will ever afterward be coming out of your bathroom shaking their heads sadly, and will whisper something to their spouses, after which the spouses will visit the bathroom.
This one-to-a-kit rule means that once you have cut the part too short, or hammered it in crooked, or glued it in wrong-way round, or stripped its threads, you are, to use the technical term from the glossary of our shower-door instructions, “screwed.” Believe me, I know this technical term, because I find myself in that situation several times in the course of every project I undertake.
How refreshing it would have been to open our shower-door box and find this on the front page of the instructions: “CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR PURCHASE OF THESE OUTSTANDING SHOWER DOORS! Installed properly, they will give you years of trouble-free service. Of course, the fact that you are actually reading these instructions tells us that you are incapable of installing them properly. Tough luck for you, pal! And by now (we’ve been in this business a long time), your son probably has come in to watch you work, your spouse likely is hovering near the door, unsure whether to stay or go, and perhaps (God forbid), your father-in-law has stopped by ‘to see how you are getting on’ with the installation. Believe us, we know just how you feel, which is why we have, wherever possible, included extra, stub-end parts for you to practice with, and commit your imbecile mistakes on, before you tackle the real thing and wind up “'screwed’ (see glossary of terms).”
--originally posted 04/2008
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