"And then I built..." DIY cautionary tales FYI
Created | Updated Dec 23, 2003
Don't try this at home!
(insert obscene Dorothy Parker quote here)
Life, someone once said, is just one thing after another.
Outside of trainspotting and gardening, one would hope that it wasn't. But when you work at an ironmongery, you meet all sorts of people and all kinds of DIY fanatics, that FYI shouldn't be outside of the ASYLUM!
But that's beside the point.
So, we build this house on top of a hill and the hill slid in the rain and now the house is a boat...
That was Senor Erlich Perliementerrolinsoya, a man with a plan...
And a contingency plan...
And a story to tell...
But enough about him.
So, we build this trellis, and she wants a patio, but the slope is bad without grading and filling and sodding and, well, you know... So, I saw half a program in Portuguese
one night about remodelling old strictrues for new purposes... And I built the patio extending from the second floor...and the stuff she was growing on the trellis,
it glommed onto the patio and the patio was on pilings and the stuff glommed so hard, it pulled the fascia brick off the house and the rain leaked behind the brick and between the floors and our bed fell into the kitchen one night, right on top of the stove... and the wife had a stock pot going, y'know, with the yak tail soup, for the holidays, y'know, Yutchis and T'kronrst?
Another example of a modern mature man engaging in the equivalent of Nostradamus trying to read a stock ticker...
There is a tragically nasty aspect to these adventurous gentlemen (and a few ladies, to be sure and fair)
and their attempts to assert their usefulness in the building trades after spending fifty or sixty years of leaving to their skillful betters whilst they were doing their bit shuffling papers or cogs or laws, earning the money so that they could afford to have a better man come and fix their tattered efforts after the fact, instead of doing the right thing, the sane thing, the only way to help the country! Paying the right man in the first place.
But, you see, my father, he opened the store in 1898, and I and my brothers, and one sister, and a niece, and a guy who used to live with my landlady,
but really wasn't related, though he fixed everyone's car for free, although he couldn't drive, well, he wasn't allowed to drive,
because he had this depth perception thing, he said , from his national service, almost but not quite during a war... They gave him the wrong test and then the wrong glasses and then the wrong operation
and while he could operate an old-fashioned Norden bombsight with his eyes closed, he couldn't see to drive without a magnifying glass and a strong wind of the right flavour...
And, there are those who say that the DIY movement has allowed men who survived the war and the rationing and the gradual blithering away by the government of any "we're all in this together" spirit...
And thus, that sense of wanna-be nostalgia and wishful thinking about the extent of government thickness, is all filtered into the insane wish to beat the crap out of some poor defenseless lumber and nails with a hammer...
And a string of chain stores dribbled across the countryside selling the cheapest possible low grade plastic tools and power tools. To what end? To indoctrinate the
nation in the idea that if you can DIY at home (if the local council and the neighbors don't get after you and you don't get fined or
ordered to change the colour of that damned tree you just spent two weeks propping up straight in the imported Papuan potting soil) than you don't need to worry about what's wrong with the rest of the world.
He (sob) wouldn't even come inna house after a while. He would spread an old moving lorry blanket
on his laminated and powered and lit toolbench with the electric self-leveling vise and the automatic depth adjusting saw and he would sleep to the sound of his walnut shell polisher
smoothing river pebbles... One night, he was a bit soaked and he was celebrating a successful bisquit joining, and he laid down on
the toolbench just the wrong way and the automatic depth adjusting saw spun up and cut just enough off the back of his head,
as he lay on his side, that .... (sob) I can't say anymore...
I burned his shed, I did...
and I'm sueing the ale maker.... it should have a label about toolsheds... and toolbenches...
A caution to us all, I should think.
A pause for reflection on the self-evident greed and selfishness of the proprietors of the DIY store that sold that nasty equipment to a besotted individual who really was in need of guidance, and now his grandchildren, who are really in need of therapy...
an avenue of endeavor that hopefully hasn't been struck by the DIY craze.
This is Cyril Curzon, leaving you with this thought until next week, don't DIY, if you DKWYD (Don't Know What You're Doing)!
