I’ve been trying to hide it for most of my adult life, but it’s time to come out. I think it’s been getting more and more obvious anyway so people were bound to start talking. I don’t want this to be any more embarrassing to my wife and family than it has to be. So let’s just get it out there: I have flunked the man test.
What? No, I’m not gay. But it’s time to confess that I am simply no good with tools. I can’t build or fix anything. While all of my man friends seem to be able to hang a false ceiling, build a sun room, lay a hardwood floor, construct a bedroom dresser, and assemble a backyard swing set, I struggle to drill a screw into a block of wood.
I blame television. My dad could do all those things. I should have been at his side like most young sons, watching and learning and being his apprentice. But the lure of sitting and watching football, Star Trek, Andy Griffith, Looney Tunes, The Lone Ranger, Bewitched, test patterns (remember those?), basically anything on TV, was too strong.
Bottom line, I just didn’t care about building things. It was much more important to find out if Gilligan was going to wind up with Ginger or Mary Ann. Problem is, now that entertainment television is basically garbage, I find myself actually looking for projects to take on. Sadly, that almost always involves tools.
Even in high school I knew tools were going to be anathema. In Shop class we were supposed to carve a bread board for our mothers out of a block of wood. I couldn’t seem to get the handle in the middle of the board. It was always too far to one side. So I just kept shaving the handle, first on one side and then the other. I wound up with a bread board that looked more like some sort of ancient Indian spear. The handle was so thin and pointed you could use it to tack a calendar on a poster board.
Another project was to construct a watering can. After cutting the metal to form the can and spout, we had to solder the two together. I think I melted about three full bars of solder into the can before getting the spout to stick. I had the only watering can in class that weighed 40 pounds.
It never got better. I assembled a bed frame in our guest room that collapsed when I tried to lay on the mattress. I changed the oil in my lawnmower only to overfill it. When I fired the mower up it started spewing hot oil like a Hawaiian volcano. Most recently Sharon asked me to put up a few metal plant hangers on our porch. There were just two screws to fasten the hangers. But when I tried to drill the first one into the wood, it went about half way in and then bent into a horrible shape that resembled some sort of balloon animal. And just to top it off, when I grabbed the screw to pull it back out, I learned that the friction of the screw and the wood makes it really hot! I have the burn blisters on my fingers to prove it.
So I give up. I’m never going to be the fix it man that I so want to be.
Wonder what’s on TV tonight?