Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Once an Engineer…
…always an engineer. When I checked into the Myrtle Beach condo last week, I found a few problems. Instead of calling Maintenance, I fixed them myself:
The toilet wouldn’t flush: I pulled off the lid and saw there was no chain connecting the handle lever to the plunger. There was a loop where the lever should have been (probably jury-rigged by a previous roomie engineer). I rotated the plunger and slipped the lever through the loop — worked ever since.
Both TVs had lousy reception: I checked the input cables and sure enough, they were loose. I tightened them and have had perfect reception ever since.
Loose saucepan handle: I forgot my Swiss army knife (forehead smack), so I took a dinner knife from the drawer and used it as a screwdriver to tighten the handle. Problem solved.
Crooked floor lamp: A floor lamp by the couch was leaning to one side. I rotated it clockwise (righty-tighty) until it stood straight up. Not loose any more.
At this point everything worked as I needed, so I didn’t go looking for anything else to fix. Now, if I was only this handy around the house…
Published in General
I bet we could find at least one person to agree to this, right @neutralobserver?
I’m with you. Why call, wait around for a repair person to show up (or not show up) when a couple minutes of investigation can often identify an easily fixed problem?
Half of being “handy” is not being afraid to take the lid off of something and have a look inside. It’s amazing how many people are absolutely unwilling to do so.
Shhhhhhhh!
And the repair dude shows up a minute after the pizza delivery guy and the game’s on.
Yep, more often than not it’s a quick fix . . .
Too late now.
In less that 200 words on household handyman-ness you’ve demonstrated more skill and ambition than most of the new hires filing into the corporation today. (Nowhere did I see anything about hours spend on social media or needing your smart-phone/music with you to perform the job.) Of course, even with your real engineering resume, the corporation would still be happy to offer you an entry level position and salary. (Maybe slightly higher if you can convince them you are a lesbian and at least 1/1024th American Indian. )
Mrs. E is the handy one around here. She is a master with that most modern of tools, the YouTube. Case in point – after 40 minutes of my cursing trying to replace the hard-to-reach convection oven fan, she pipes in, “Dr. Google says the screws are reverse threaded. What does that mean?”
This sort of thing happens with embarrassing regularity at our house.
It’s partly an apartment-dweller thing. Owners/maintainers don’t want you to open things up as it might make more work for them (and they might charge you for that) or it might reveal their negligent kludgery.
So people are trained to be incurious and incapable.
No one available to carry a Message to Garcia?
I can do this . . .
As best I can recall, Stad is a nucular engineer. This was all mechanical engineering.
Being able to You Tube car repairs , appliance repairs, and home repairs has made me much much more willing to try to repair things, and much more successful when I try . Takes less time also. As soon as my soldering iron cools so I can change tips, back to building my Tubes4hifi VTA-120 Vacuum tube amplifier kit. PDF manuals and schematics on-line also help.
YouTube has enabled me to master the reassembly of the Ruger .22 target pistol. I never would have made it without it.
It means the manufacturer didn’t want you to do repairs yourself but tried to make it so you’d have to call thier authorized service at $75/hour, 3 hour minimum .
I must say if those screws weren’t destroyed after 40 minutes of struggling I’m impressed……. Or else you’re just a weakling.
Although I have an engineering degree, I have never worked as an engineer (I went into patent law), and am not particularly handy, yet many the time even I have been able to fix something in a hotel room rather than wait for maintenance. Toilets (as you note, linkage between handle and flap loose or disconnected) and lamps (often as simple as it got unplugged) are most common.
It was an urban legend at my engineering university that the landlords hated renting to electrical engineering students. Apparently, they had a bad habit of “fixing” things without any thought to minor issues like “code compliance.”
While I only went two years as an engineering major, I do have the do-it-yourself attitude (as seen by the stuff I managed to replace, repair, and repurpose). That being said though, I have a profound respect for the law of unintended consequences, particularly in regards to problems that can result from live wires or leaky pipes, and so I tread carefully in those areas.
Back in the day, we would get a break on a beach house we rented from a friend because my dad would fix anything that was broken around the place. He’d call dad up the week before and give him a heads up so he’d bring the right tools. It was never anything too major, but stuff that needed fixing all the same.
Nukes do a lot of mechanical. It’s like cross-dressing . . .
What’s that? If it works, it works . . .
Some of us are OCD enough to fix it to code. /-:
In my first job, an older Engineer and I wound up going up to the Warminster Navy base outside of Philadelphia for multiple trips. The cheap motel which was closest to the base always had a problem in one of our rooms – which we would usually fix. Eventually, the owners figured it out and started cycling us through all the rooms.
You gotta know the code first.
Yup. Part of that OCD business.
Apropos of nothing, I once argued with a building inspector for a couple of weeks about stair tread width. The minimum, in commercial buildings was 12″. He didn’t want to count the (usually) 1″ overhang on the treads. I finally convinced him that I was right, luckily, because they were concrete pan stairs which had already been poured. When I thought about it later, I decided I was wrong.
Typically you have to get the ME for the NucE
Engineers even to the bitter end.
Hay, Stad… perhaps You could come over and fix My VCR. It’s still blinking 12:00 AM SUN.
You would think so, but if you stay where he stayed you would be well advised to take a Geiger counter.