Thoughts of LoWriter

Repair

I had a fantastic day today solely because I had a chance to emulate my hero, Kaylee, at work. For those of you who don't know who Kaylee is, there is simply no excuse for you, but I added a link anyway so that you can stop being so lame. Some of my friends accuse me of being a lot like her, and I think that's probably true despite the fact that my family claims I have no mechanical aptitude.

The ASVAB (which is a military test, don't let them fool you) thought I should repair the army's tanks (I scored high in mechanical comprehension, which is over to the right at the bottom of the list). And at the time (and since) I've often joked about the fact that they would probably want me to repair the enemy's tanks because that's how much I suck at all things mechanical.

Yet, now that I have a job where I'm the only one who can make the computers run or who can unjam the copier (and one day, I did fix it. I had to twist a dial and press a button in the tray and everything), I've started to think that they might not have been so far off.

Which brings me to why my day was so excellent. I fixed a stapler.

This is not the simple task that it might seem, and to fully appreciate how complicated it is, you should probably go get an office sized stapler to look at while we discuss. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Dooo do dooo do dooo dooo.

Ready?

OK. Now, open it up like you would if you were going to replace the staples. See the long spring? Well, it came off of my stapler, and now you need to look at how it's wound underneath an obnoxious piece of metal and then comes back up underneath itself to hook down at the bottom. And believe me, that spring is not actually that long. It's probably about the size of my index finger when it is not being wound around obnoxious metal. And also notice that you can't get your fingers in there to actually manipulate the spring.

Why even bother, you ask? My department's budget is frozen. Nobody can buy anything. Couple that with the fact that a million students use that stapler and the fact that it was brand f-ing new before Christmas, and you have a recipe for my fix-it-ness.

Also, I am a show off.

Using only two paperclips, another stapler as an example and the sheer force of my will, I was able to fix the stapler. While being interrupted at irregular intervals to help people figure out Word, too.

So, then, of course, I had to go around bragging. I was quite stoked.

Back when I was a kid, I used to watch Dad and Grandpa fix the machines. My cousin and I would play around on the combine while Dad and Grandpa tinkered somewhere underneath. We'd pick up bolts from the floor and my cousin would clean them and somebody gave him a penny for every so many or something like that (because farmers are constantly dropping and losing those sorts of things and our family had been doing so for years and years without any small children who liked to dig in the dirt). I just liked to hang around. This was, of course, before Mom's yelling at me about being covered in dirt and machine grease finally took.

At one point, Dad asked my cousin if he could reach something under the combine. I watched, but my cousin's hands were too big. My cousin said, "Maybe L can do it; she has small hands," but Dad said, "No, she can't do it." And even though I said I could, he refused to let me try. I always thought that it was because I was a girl, and that, at least in my memory, marked the end of me playing in the machine shed while they worked. I knew that while I might visit and climb on the combine, I was never going to be part of the work that went on in there, so I found other things to do.

I'm long over blaming my dad for things like this. He may not have meant this the way I took it at four or five years old. He was just a farm guy trying to do the best he could with what he had, and it probably didn't even cross his mind that I might be able to help. Who knows? Maybe he was right.

But that's the thing I'm constantly wondering about. I wonder what would have happened if this hadn't happened in the middle of harvesting and if he hadn't been trying to beat whatever natural distaster was next on the list to the crop. If I had been encouraged to tinker, what would have happened?

I fix all my own stuff (well, what I can fix anyway). Jewelery, my watch, my chair, bookshelves, light fixtures (which, true, I did accidentally pull down myself). If something falls apart at my place, I put it back together. I glue it or take my screwdriver and screw it back together or prop something under it or take my pliers and pinch it back together and I never thought of this stuff as mechanical before. I was the first one to laugh at the ASVAB test because the idea was preposterous.

And yet, here I am fixing a stapler and getting a thrill from it.

How very Kaylee of me.

Posted by LoWriter at January 27, 2006 03:57 PM