The Pondering Absurdist

From an early age my mother repeatedly said to me throughout my time with her, “you can do anything you set your mind to.” With this ingrained into me, all my life I’ve been a “jack of all trades,” regardless of my career training. The only time I would ever have called someone to fix something at my house was when it was a large job better suited to people who do it on a routine basis. An example would be the $13,000 plumbing job I paid for when I found that one of the sewer drain pipes had broken underneath the concrete slab that my house sits upon. That job involved saw-cutting a hole in my hallway, then through the front office/bedroom out to daylight. After that, digging a trench about 3 feet deep, down to the offending sewer pipe. Then they had to replace the pipe, put all the dirt back in the hole, and lay down new concrete to match the existing slab. When they initially ran the TV camera down the sewer pipe, they found that tree roots had invaded the pipe further out in the yard, so the saw-cutting and trenching with a backhoe continued across my driveway and eventually ended up at the sewer connection in the street (hence, the $13,000 bill). Sure, I could have done it by myself with a sledgehammer and a shovel (at least I tell myself that), but the job required permits and inspections from the County, and it would have taken me at least 6 months to a year, or possibly even two years (who knows?), to do all that manual labor myself while working a 40 hour per week, full time job. The toll it would have taken on my body would have been mind-numbing as well (I’ve had some back problems since a car accident I was involved in as a teenager). The plumbers, with a young work crew and the correct equipment, got the job finished within a few days and I could use my toilets again. In times like that I know that I just have to “suck it up” and pay the piper.

In every other situation, be it electrical, concrete, construction/destruction, yard work, or automotive, I typically do the work myself. If I’ve never done the specific task before (not likely by now), I will usually look up the correct way to do something, buy any required tool if I don’t already own one, and proceed from there. Some things done to a house are supposed to require County permits and licensed individuals, but I may or may not (not admitting anything here) have taken on a task or two myself if it was easy enough. Over the many years of home-ownership this has probably saved me thousands of dollars, I’m sure.

And now, to the impetus behind this post. I bought one of those cat toys a couple years ago, a printed fish pattern on cloth with soft fill material, and a USB battery-powered motor mechanism that makes the tail wag when the fish is touched. Initially when I gave the toy to my 3 girls as small kittens the big (it was almost as big as they were when they were kittens), noisy contraption scared the bejesus out of them. So, I put it away in the closet until they were older. After they were a year old, I took it back out and gave it to them again. They were initially wary of it, but after a while one of my cats (Mila, the Russian Blue) took a liking to it and started to play with it. She’s been playing with it off and on for several months now. She will even do what the photos from the ads show, lying on her side while grasping the fish with her paws. It’s very cute, I must say. The other two girls don’t really play with it much, if at all, but Mila really seems to like it.

I noticed last week that the fish still made the noise (the motor inside turning back and forth), but the tail wasn’t moving. Finally, this morning (I’ve been on vacation for a few days during the holidays) I decided to take it apart and see if I could figure out what is the problem, why the tail doesn’t wag anymore. After all, I can fix anything (right?). I spent about an hour or so, taking the motor casing apart, cleaning all the residual catnip out of it, checking all the little gears inside to see if one of the teeth had broken off, or whatever else might be the problem. I finally trouble-shot the problem down to the little piece of plastic that goes into the tail to make it wag. More specifically, where the plastic connects to the motor shaft. It turns out that the motor shaft (a small, squared off piece of metal) had worn the plastic tail (which also started off with a square hole to match the motor shaft) to a point where the previously square hole is now round, so the motor shaft just spins freely inside the tail piece. Immediately, again, my mind set upon the thought “how can I fix it?” I decided that maybe some glue down in the round holes would help. It didn’t, so now I’m back to where this whole episode started. I have a fish with a broken tail.

What’s my point? Sometimes being a know-it-all who can do anything isn’t always the most productive use of one’s time. I wasted (?) an hour of my time, when instead I could have been working in my garage to complete the room I’m building for my air compressor (another story)… all for the sake of a cat toy that costs $8.99 brand new at Walmart. I did all that “work” for nothing, at much less than minimum wage (California rates). I guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was, huh?

PA