Mr. Fixit

I am the unhandiest man on the planet. I don’t understand how to put things together, how things work, how to maintain them, or how to fix them when they break. I don’t understand tools. I can neither comprehend nor follow instructions, especially those that use diagrams instead of words.

What I do understand, fifty years after I learned how, because my father insisted I take Latin rather than Shop, the only other elective offered to freshman males in my high school where my classmates were taught practical manly things about which I shall remain forever clueless, is how to conjugate verbs in Latin, the official language of the Roman Empire which undoubtedly collapsed because it was run by guys who sat around all day conjugating verbs rather than keeping the Colosseum and aqueducts in working order.

Go ahead. Laugh at me. Everyone does. Which makes me all the more determined, whenever something needs to be assembled or repaired, to do it myself.  I’m always convinced, whenever I start a project, that this time I’m not only going to complete it, it will be done right. But it never is and I always have to call someone in to finish the job. 

Right now I’m frustrated because I’ve spent two full days trying to repair an elaborate pool umbrella that collapsed two days ago. The pole that holds the canopy snapped off just above the round thingamajig that’s filled with sand and keeps the whole shebang from toppling over. It looked like a simple fix.

Since then, I’ve been on the phone with the manufacturer three times ordering replacement parts that now total $972.13. I was pissed today, when I visited the store where we originally bought the damned thing to get an idea of how to fit the parts I’ve taken apart back together, to see a floor model identical to ours on sale for $899 including delivery and set-up.

When the parts I've ordered arrive I’ll putz around for a couple of more days trying to figure out how they fit together with the parts I’ve disassembled from the original, and will wind up having to call Tony, the handyman I keep on speed dial, to put them all together. That’s assuming I have ordered the right parts in the first place which I probably haven’t.

Realistically, I don’t want anyone sitting under that umbrella until I’m sure it has been repaired properly because it weighs a ton and they’d be hurt or killed if it collapsed on them. 

And that, as they used to say in ancient Rome, would be a horribilis thing.