It's a Wonderful Life. I think.

My favorite relationship in the classic holiday movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, isn’t between people. It’s between George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) and the decorative knob at the bottom of his staircase. It’s broken. Every time he touches it, it comes off in his hand, an allegory for everything broken in his life that he finds frustrating. 

Cut to my wonderful life which, this year as always, is running true to form. Just as we are getting ready for holiday house guests, everything we own is breaking. A chronological diary of my last two and a half days:

Saturday, 4 a.m: Our house’s security system, which is turned off, starts screeching. The dachshunds are hysterical. I jump out of bed, enter the security code on the keypad, which silences the screech, and get back under the covers. I’m almost asleep when the security company calls and asks if everything is OK.

Saturday, 6:30 a.m:  (See Saturday, 4 a.m.)

Saturday 9 a.m: I call the security monitoring company. The technician says the back-up system, located in a case at the very top of a 14-foot tall closet, requires a new battery. Unfortunately, no service personnel are available until Monday. He instructs me to remove the cover of the case. I tell him I have to go to the garage for a ladder. Once I bring it in, set it up and climb to the top, he asks if I see the battery. I say yes. He says to disconnect it and take it to Batteries Plus to buy a new one. He says it will be easy to replace it myself.

Saturday 9:30 a.m: My local Batteries Plus store is out of this particular battery, but there’s one at another store 25 miles away. I drive there. By 11:30 a.m. the battery is replaced.

Saturday noon: When I open the door to the guest room I hear the toilet in the adjacent bathroom running. I just had it fixed. I call the plumber. He says I’ll have to pay an extra $75 for a weekend call. I tell him I’ll fix it myself.

Saturday 1 p.m: My wife announces she can’t open the dishwasher. The handle is broken. I manage to open it but hear plastic cracking.

Saturday 2:30 p.m: I take my car into the dealer’s service department for its scheduled oil change. I like a car dealer with Saturday service hours.

Saturday 2:43 p.m: The dealer’s service advisor walks into the waiting area looking grim and gestures for me to follow him to his office. He reads off a list of things the car needs done. The total comes to just over $2,100. “Is any of this covered under warranty?” I ask. He checks. “Yes, almost all of it, but your warranty expired two days ago.”

I tell him just to change the damn oil so I can go down the street to a dealer who sells reliable cars and buy one.

I don’t do that, however. Once the oil is changed I come home.

Saturday 4 p.m: The alarm system goes off two minutes after I walk through the door. I call the security company. This technician – a different one – says it sounds like the battery leads are corroded. I go to the garage, schlep the ladder back to the closet and climb it. The leads are fine. He suggests unplugging the transformer to reboot the system. I do. The screeching stops. He says to plug it back in and everything should work fine.

Saturday 4:30 p.m: I hop on my bike to take a ride to work off my frustrations. The chain snaps in two halfway up the block.

Saturday 4:45 p.m: I go to the fridge for a Diet Coke. The can is frozen solid. Everything on the top shelf of the fridge – milk, ketchup, jelly, bottled water – is frozen solid. Luckily, we have two smaller fridges, so I move everything into those.

Saturday: 5 p.m: I decide to make peanut brittle. (See blog post directly beneath this one.)

Saturday sometime between 9 and 10 p.m: The screen of my wife’s five-year-old MacBook Pro laptop goes blank. Having owned a company that operated Mac equipment, I know what that means: It has given up the ghost.

Sunday, 1 a.m:  The alarm blasts us out of a deep sleep. This time it won’t turn off when I enter the code. I go back to the garage, haul the ladder into the house, climb to the top of the closet, and pull the leads from the battery. It continues to screech. I unplug the transformer. It shuts up. One of the dogs pees all over the floor – we just spent $500 to have the grout cleaned -- while this is going on.

Sunday 5 a.m: Having been unable to get back to sleep, I google “Kitchenaid dishwasher handle troubleshooting” and find a youtube video in which an appliance repairman explains it’s an easy fix, provided you have part # 9743903. The repair looks simple. I know from experience that I can’t do it myself – I can’t do anything technical – but my son, who has a Masters from Georgia Tech, is arriving today. He’s handy. I’m going to locate that part first thing Monday and have him fix it.

Sunday 1:30 p.m: En route to the airport I stop at Lowes and buy a toilet repair kit. I’ll have him fix that, too.

Sunday 3 p.m: I call the security company to schedule a service call. The technician – I’ve never talked to this one – asks why. I explain. He has me fetch the ladder, climb it, hook up the leads to the battery and plug in the transformer. He says that often the system fixes itself after it has been unplugged for a while. We should be good to go.

Sunday 7:30 p.m: The alarm starts screeching. I call the security company. This technician says it’s a battery problem. I tell him I replaced the f-----g battery. He asks me if I replaced the battery in the brown case or white case. I say, “white case.” He says I should have replaced the one in the brown case. I didn’t know there was one in the brown case. He says to disconnect everything and he’ll have someone to the house by noon Monday but warns they are extremely short-staffed, this being Christmas week, so he might be a few minutes late.

Monday 7:45 a.m: I again watch the youtube video detailing step-by-step instructions for replacing the dishwasher handle. This is going to be a piece of cake.

Monday 8:30 - 9 a.m: I call six appliance parts stores. The sixth, which is 30 miles away, has the part in stock. I drive there to get it. When I come out of the store, the car won’t start. (The guy at the dealer said the battery could fail at any minute but who would have thunk?) I call the roadside assistance number that came with the car. The operator says I’ll have to pay because, according to her computer, my warranty just expired. The clerk at the parts store gives me a jump. I drive to Firestone, not the car dealership, and have a new battery installed.

Monday 11:45 a.m: I arrive home. My wife and son are golfing. I decide that, as long as I have to stay home waiting for the alarm repairman, I’ll fix the dishwasher myself. But I have never seen screws like the ones I’m supposed to remove. I call an appliance repair company and explain the problem. The guy who answers sounds like Boris of the Boris & Natasha cartoon on Bullwinkle, and says he will try to get here before 5 p.m. Christmas Eve but can’t promise. I tell him about the fridge. He asks the brand. I tell him. He says he doesn’t service that brand so I’ll need to contact the manufacturer but warns they are costly to fix.

Monday noon: I turn on the lanai ceiling fan. It’s dead.

Monday 1:15 p.m: I call the security company and ask where they hell they are because I have better things to do than sit around waiting for them to show. The operator says someone was here at 12:15 and rang the doorbell but there was no answer. I check the doorbell. It’s broken.

I really do have a wonderful life … all these material possessions are unimportant in the scheme of things …. and, considering my many blessings, I feel like the richest man in town.

I just hope that, once the holidays are over, I can go to Bailey’s Building & Loan and borrow some money to get all this broken shit fixed.

George will understand, I’m sure of it.