I've had a rough few days. Earlier this week my brand new iPod got stolen from the basket of the Death Machine while I was sitting outside the coffee shop with my nose stuck in a book. It was wrong place, wrong time: evidently some punk kid was going on an iPod-stealing bender that day; he nabbed another one from someplace else in town. I wonder if he stole it right out from under its owner's nose? He did with mine -- the headphones were still around my neck when he palmed it from the basket on the front of my scooter ad just kept walking, carrying my expensive electronic device with him down the street and leaving me sitting there gaping at him with a pair of five-dollar headphones and nothing attached. I ran into the shop and had Jared chase him down the street, but the kid could not be caught, nor the iPod recovered.
The day following this little fiasco, I tripped over my corded phone on my way out the door to work and ripped it from the wall. With it came the careful tape-and-shaping-wire rigging job my Dad did for me some months back to hold the clip from the end of the phone line into the antiquated wall jack. I tried to clip it back in, but the plastic part inside the plate on the wall came apart and had to be replaced. I must say that I tried valiantly to do this myself. After discovering that I could purchase 2 dollars' worth of equipment from the hardware store instead of paying Verizon $95 and waiting a week for the repairman, I cruised down to YBC and bought a new phone jack. I read the instructions on the back: unscrew the old plate from the wall, connect the colored wires from the back of the old plate to the corresponding places on the back of the new plate, screw the new plate to the wall and plug the phone back in. Voila! Simple. A monkey could do it.
Or so I thought.
First, I fought with the screwdriver. I always fail to remember that I have no fine motor skills until I try to use them and mess something up. I stripped a screw and hassled with the damn thing for almost an hour before finally succeeding in pulling the plate off the wall, only to realize that there was a second set of screws under the first set and a third set of screws under those. By the time I got down through the third set of screws to the wiring, I was so pissed off I could have happily hacked that entire part of the wall away and thrown it out the window, phone line and all. But I persisted, because I don't like to quit things once I start them and because I had in my mind the vague notion that succeeding in my endeavor to replace my own phone jack would somehow prove to the world, once and for all, that little femme lesbians with a palsy who barely know the difference between different types of screwdrivers and who have barely ever even had to plunge a toilet can be mechanically minded. I also desperately wanted to be smarter than a monkey.
With these oh-so-lofty goals in mind, I tackled the job of connecting the wires. It proved to be too much for my bad eyes and my clumsy fingers. Two hours later, when Dad came in carting a bottle of red wine (ESP??) I was sitting on the couch with my head in my hands, and a colorful display of unconnected wires was dangling from the wall.He tried to help. He stripped the wires, connected them, screwed the whole mess in tight and then connected the phone. I picked it up. Dead. He tried it again, inspecting the wires, reconnecting them, plugging in the phone. Still dead. He tried it a third time. Still dead. By this point I was swigging Fisheye like the town drunk and imagining myself hemorrhaging nonexistent money. I was also hearing unmistakable monkey noises somewhere in the back of my head. My frustration boiled over, and I started to cry. "I just wanted to --" *sniffle* "Do it by myself -- " *Sniffle* "And instead I spent the whole day on it and screwed it all up! I'm dumber than a monkey!" *Sniffle, wail.* I have always been a little overly catastrophic with my emotions. Thankfully, my Dad knows this by now. He played the voice of reason calming the blubbering female (who at this point felt a lot less like Superwoman bettering the world for feminists everywhere and a lot more like a totally helpless little idiot-woman,) and by the time he left I was somewhat calmer. I carted my laptop down to the coffee shop to let everyone know I would be off grid for the week.
On the way home, some of my neighbors hailed me from the gazebo to discuss the stolen iPod. I told them about the phone. My neighbor Stanley went to his apartment and got his tool belt. He dangled it over the balcony and called down, "Meet you at your door." I stopped bitching and went up.
Stanley fixed the damn thing in ten minutes. Ten minutes! He inspected it, made hmming noises, and then did something with his pocketknife. He beckoned me over. He had cut all the wires to the same length and then stripped them further down. "You did everything right," he said. "But look here." He twisted the green wire just the tiniest bit, and a piece of it snapped off in his hand. "It was broken down where the insulation was holding it together. You just couldn't see the broken part." He hooked up the wires again, screwed the plate into the wall, and called my phone from his cell. I was never so delighted to hear a phone ring in my whole life! I could've hugged him. I offered to cook for him, (my Dad's idea) but given that I had already disclosed the little factoid that I have absolutely zero skill in the kitchen and that my particular specialty happens to be Lean Cuisine -- or char -- he respectfully declined. That was okay by me. I didn't need any more help feeling like a 50s sitcom housewife.
I would like to turn this into a fable and give you a moral of the story, as in: the moral of the story is: "never question your genetic make-up over a failed attempt at something," but I am a creature of habit. I have tried and tried to learn not to be so dramatically emotional when frustrated, but the truth is I'll probably do it again. I have to say that my patience has improved considerably, however: it took me 3 hours to get to the boo-hooing this time, whereas before I would have simply started crying right away. Perhaps this is not an admirable thing to admit about myself, but it's the truth. Growing up, nothing was allowed to be wrong: there could not be a wrinkle in my bedsheets after making up the bed or an imperfection in the polish if I tried to do my nails. I was punished for dumbass things like holding my fork the wrong way at dinner or accidentally slipping the hinge on a clothespin. Some of that has stuck with me. I was fully twenty years old before I stopped flinging my hands up to protect my face whenever I thought I might have done something wrong. I am a work in progress. I suppose then, there is a moral to this story. It's an Alan Jackson song, and I am an absolute genius and smarter than a monkey after all! Ha!
Tif
Just be patient; I'm a work in progress -- Alan Jackson
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