I’ll Take ExLax for 500, Alex

(even as I write that subject line I realized that it's a childishly funny double entendre)

If today's blog was a Jeopardy category it would be "Potpourri". When we bought our 70 year old house about 20 years ago there were a number of things that required fixin'. I wish I'd inherited my dad's handyman gene, but alas naught, so it was trial by disaster. Here's the deal with fixing stuff on a house. If you f*** something up it can usually be repaired, but the degree to which you're willing to f*** it up, and the amount of disposable income you have at your disposal is the tipping point, to overuse an overused term.

Leaky faucets? No big deal. Installing vinyl floor tile? A bit more pressure, especially if your friends have a sense of how it SHOULD look ie straight. Installing ceramic floor tile, hardwood flooring, constructing a load-bearing wall? Ain't gonna happen. Cutting a 12" by 12" hole in your roof so you can install a powered ventilator to draw the heat from your attic? That was my first biggie, and I sat on that roof for an hour straight, saw in hand, trying to work up the nerve to actually cut a hole in my roof, one big enough that a small animal could jump through, soaked from the downpour that would inevitably burst from the sky the moment I opened up the roof. But I did it, and it worked.

Actually while I'm on the subject of domestic repairs here's a list of things I've done to myself whilst puttering around the homestead;

- fell off the roof and cracked some ribs
- fell off a ladder and cracked some ribs
- cut into a live 100 amp electrical circuit with a pair of pliers (melted part of the pliers and made a big Discovery Channel kind of sound)
- ran over my foot with a 400 pound lawn roller
- cut into my fingers with an electric hedge trimmer
- fell off the deck and tore all the ligaments in my left ankle
- tore the skin off the inside of my lower lip because I thought it would be a good place to hold a piece of duct tape while I made an adjustment to whatever I was taping

Of course beyond the house there are things I simply refuse to take apart, one being a computer hard drive. Sure, I can install one (it's pretty easy, give it a shot, save yourself a few bucks) but if there's a serious cock-up that Norton or Disk Warrior can't fix then who am I to go poking at the innards like a moron trying to free a trapped bagel from a live toaster with a bread knife. So it's off to Future Shop (slogan: "We don't give a f***, just buy something"), flaky drive in hand. By mistake I cued up in line at the "disservice" counter. While Doug of the 2 man Bob and Doug service team trundled off to Aisle 7 with a customer, Bob told the next 2 people in line that he couldn't help them, that their queries were Doug's department. This made it my turn. I explained my problem, and before I could finish, Mr Service Man, whose attention span was that of a crack addict with a bladder issue, told me to take it to a cashier and exchange it for a new one. When I explained that it was a 3 year old drive that I didn't buy at Future Shop, the exchange went like this;

HIM: I can't help you

ME: You can't repair it? (naively I thought the sign saying "repairs" meant "repairs"

HIM: No. Next?

This kind of shit drives me nuts. If you have no intention of even taking the time to listen to a customer and then explaining WHY you can't fix it, and then suggesting an alternative solution, then you should become a MP or an MPP or go work at CanadianTire (slogan: "we don't have it") – but those are 2 stories that I'll save for another day.