My dad’s deck building business got a call recently from a highly educated professional woman who needed someone to come change a doorknob at her house. Even conceding that doorknobs can be very tricky things, you have to wonder if 8 or 10 years of higher education should not include the simple process of wielding a screw driver and reading directions.
Remember our washer deal, where the repairman gave us coupons for a new one, without even picking up a wrench or taking off a single part of the washer? My husband didn’t really have time to trouble shoot with the terribly boring repairman’s manual that was taped inside the washer frame, but he worked and worked at it, one computer panel at a time. After he replaced the transmission, there were still glitches, with it running perfectly sometimes and dropping the rinse cycles at other times, or refusing to spin, or even locking the lid and not opening it for 6 hours.
It was maddening. Our elderly neighbor had given us an enormous can of salted peanuts for Christmas. We stored them on the dryer so that Gabe could chew peanuts while he messed with that recalcitrant washer. He researched online a lot, while I, not unlike Job’s wife, kind of thought it was the computer and maybe we should give up. Just before he scraped the bottom of the peanuts can, Gabe replaced a simple little part that actually fixed all the problems. It was very, very gratifying.
I remembered this when the dishwasher started giving me grief, leaving many of the dishes on the top rack with a sandy, disgusting residue of food and detergent. I knew Gabe could probably fix it once he ever had a free weekend, but I decided to Little Red Hen it, with Youtube for my crutch. On Friday after the children were started on their lessons, I began to take it apart, one piece at a time. I found tutorials, and by lunchtime, I was down to the sump, digging my fingers gingerly in its bowels for anything that might be clogging it. Two toothpicks, about 7 popcorn kernels, a bunch of grapefruit seeds, some indescribable grey matter, and a shard of glass later, it was all cleared out. Alex helped me assemble it all and we loaded our dishes for a trial run that produced sparkling clean dishes! It was very, very gratifying.
It might be my imagination, but it seems to be louder than before. Think I should call the local deck builders about that?
wocket in my pocket 
You are the bomb! I confess to going only as far as picking up the phone and saying “daddy could you fix……for me”. And he does and that’s that.