Episode 10: Give me 30 minutes

I liked to tinker with anything mechanical when I was a child. I remember taking apart our television remote control regularly, just for the fun of putting it back together. I can still remember how that remote felt in my hand and how the large buttons for changing the volume and channels made a clunking noise. I don’t know why I believed I could fix things, since I had no training whatsoever, but I was confident and dove into fix-it projects whenever grownups weren’t around to stop me.

My dad traveled a lot for business and, inevitably, that’s when there would be a snow storm or a power outage or some appliance would stop working. When I was around eight years old, Dad was out of town and our washing machine (similar to the one pictured here) broke down. Mom was working full time, so she was fretting about how to get it repaired when she couldn’t be there to meet a repairman. By “fretting”, I mean she was yelling, pounding her fists, and swearing under her breath (but we could still hear her).

I decided to save the day by offering to fix it for her. She and my sister both laughed at me, but I said, “Just let me try for half an hour. If I can’t fix it, you can call the repairman.” She shrugged, said, “Go ahead and try”, figuring I probably couldn’t make it any worse than it already was. About thirty minutes later, as promised, I went upstairs and said, “Okay, you can try it now.” Skeptical but intrigued, she went to the basement and put a load in the machine, started it, and VOILA—it worked! She immediately asked me what I had done to get it to work again, but apparently I wouldn’t tell her a thing. Now, over fifty years later, I not only don’t remember what I did to get it to work, but I don’t remember the incident at all.

Not all my fix-it jobs went as well as that one. I do recall trying to fix an old TV we had sitting around, only to blow out the electricity in half our house. I’m just lucky I didn’t electrocute myself in the process.

Episode 11: Iced

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