By Jim Hagarty
1987
The type of stress I hate the most is the kind that sneaks up on you when you’re feeling good. I can handle the variety that hangs around all day and mixes in with all your other worries so that you hardly notice it. After a while, the fear of cancer, car accidents, bankruptcy, unemployment, crime, nuclear annihilation and the possibility that Oral Roberts may be right become almost like old friends and you can actually learn to nod off to sleep now and then with all this happening in your head. But stress that swoops down out of nowhere and attacks like a bird yanking fish out of the water really bugs me.
Take Saturday, for instance. It was a fairly nice day and all was well with the world. The neighbour kids were over at my place asking me, “Whatcha doin’?” “Why?” and “Can I do dat?” Grumbles my cat was running around putting her head into every opening where a cat’s head shouldn’t be. And all around me the neighbourhood was abuzz with cars being washed, bikes being ridden and lawns being cut.
I’d had a shower and my first coffee of the day and I don’t mind saying I was feeling unusually content. Things were under control. Bills mostly paid. House fairly clean. New fast-food restaurant opened up the day before right behind my place. What more could a man ask for?
In retrospect, I know now that this is where I should have hit the pause button. But the trouble with feeling good is it makes you want to do things. Things you weren’t necessarily designed to do. Like planting flowers. Or ironing your shirts. Or changing a bulb in a car with hideaway headlights.
I’ve been buying and changing headlights in cars for the past 20 years. Takes 10 minutes, tops, and then only if you stop for a five-minute break. But I hadn’t yet replaced either one of the pop-up types in my latest vehicle. I never will again.
The last I saw of my serenity, it was sneaking off down the driveway along with my patience and common sense about the same time I knelt before the front of the car, screwdriver and new headlight in hand. The first step in machinery repair is turn every screw you see. Eventually, something has to come apart. It’s always worked in the past but this time it didn’t.
I finally fumbled in the glove box for the owner’s manual and on pages 24 to 26 there were a series of illustrations and 19 detailed steps to follow when changing a headlight. Get a load of this: “Separate the I-cavity black connector at the blue wire … remove the Torx screws from the upper corners of the black plastic outer bezel … pull the retaining spring away from the bottom corner of the headlight assembly … reinstall the bezel … torque to 8 N.m (6 ft. lbs.) ….”
But I really lost it at Step 12 when I read this statement concerning the first two screws I’d twisted away at before I got out the manual. It said: “DO NOT remove or adjust these screws.” Now, if this instruction was so important that they’d capitalized the do not, don’t you think they’d have put a little warning label right above the screws themselves? And don’t you think it would have been Step 1 and not Step 12? Well, DON’T YOU?
I’ve decided not to take you through a curse-by-curse description of what ensued from there. I really don’t want to relive it. But an hour after I started this little job, every one of my tools and half the neighbour’s were strewn across the driveway. Every blood cell in my body had been summoned to begin emergency repair of my bruised, skinless knuckles and my neighbours learned that I know words I haven’t even got around to using in this column yet.
Edited for print, this is, in part, what I had to say at one point: “I can’t believe it. They can’t be serious. How could anyone design something this stupid? I have never seen anything so dumb in my whole life. Grumbles, you little rodent, get out of that box! I will never, ever fix anything on this car again. Ever. What a ridiculous setup. Why couldn’t they think of something simpler? Why? That’s all I want to know. Grumbles, get out of that bag, you little pest. Go on. Get out of there. I said, GET OUT OF THERE! Boy this makes me mad. Why can’t things ever just run smoothly? How could such a small car be such a big pain in the neck?”
Anyway, you get the idea. In time, the headlight got installed, the tools were put away and Grumbles took refuge in the rafters in my garage. Good move on her part. A few hours later, I calmed down.
But, when I drove down the highway Saturday night, my right headlight gave me a real good view of the tops of the trees along the side of the road but the pavement right ahead of the car lay in darkness.
I think there should be meetings where we do-it-yourselfers could share our woes and find the strength to give up our compulsion to fix things. Then, before we fell into the tinkering trap, we could call a buddy and get talked down.
Until then, we’ll have to continue to suffer alone, misunderstood by the mass of society who find changing a light bulb as easy as – changing a light bulb.
