We pride ourselves on our capabilities. We confidently tell other people that they too can be do-it-yourself repairmen for their own households.
And then we encounter the human factor as my daughter did the week that her van’s electronic doors refused to obey when she pushed the button to open or close them.
As she related the incident to me: “Our automatic closing doors had stopped closing. All the sudden we had to yank them open or close them against the motor.”
“Jacob said it was probably a fuse, so I went to the auto parts store. They showed me which fuse they thought it was. I went back to the car and looked in the owner’’s manual to see where the fuses went. It showed me where it was, but I had the wrong number on the fuse. I went back and switched fuses.”
“I looked under the hood, and it found a completely different type of fuse. It did not look blown.”
“I thought, great, I just bought a fuse. It is not blown and it is the wrong size.”
“I studied the manual and found that there were four fuse boxes, and inside each were hidden fuses. In the process one of the fuses just flew out and landed somewhere in the car. I decided to go back and replace all the fuses although none of these looked blown.”
“After school, I went to the shop determined that I would not go home from the shop until I had them all changed. I would stay there because I might need a tool or some help. The three kids were crawling all over the car and honking the horn. I had to send Eli, 6, to go in and get a tool to change the fuses. But, I changed them, all of them, and I was feeling pretty proud of myself when I pushed the button to open the door. It did not work. I pushed it again. It still did not work.”
“I looked again at the panel where the buttons were and then I remembered there is an on-off button for all those switches. It was turned to ‘off.’ Apparently I had not turned the button on.”
“I felt like an idiot instead of a genius.”
She said she told her friend the story of her fuses.
The friend laughed and said, “at least it was a $15 mistake instead of a $60 mistake.” The friend went on to say that one day she got into her car to go somewhere and it would not crank. No matter what she did, it would not engage the engine, so she called a tow truck and had it towed.
They could not figure it out at first, not until they saw that the car gear shift was not even in park, so of course it would not start.
Once they shifted the gears to “park,” it started beautifully.
That reminded me of the time we had a house full with grandchildren and their parents all using our two bathrooms to shower, shave and prepare for the day. It barely sufficed and then my husband noticed that the guest bath tub had clogged up and stopped draining. He cautioned everyone to stay out of the room … he was about to use a strong drain cleaner to remove the clog.
It smelled so horrible that I kept the door shut. An hour later, the tub was less full, but it still would not drain when he tried to rinse it out.
He went through the drain-clearing routine again.
Halfway through the afternoon of our family frustration with only one bathroom, he took a second look and realized that while the other bath tub used a hand-placed stopper, this one (which he never used) had a lever to lift to plug it. The lever had not been dropped to drain the tub. Once he pushed the lever down, the tub drained efficiently.
It’s things like that which keep us humble in the world of Do-It-Yourself.