Despite being partly a sociopath, a lunatic, misogynistic, a gloating bastard and a cynic that cannot hold back his happiness when the office is losing a valuable workday again for some reason I predicted, there is also a kind, loving and caring part of me that does all that for no reason but to know that someone was happy because of it.
Some time ago the doorbell rang and I expected some literally childish nuisance that needed PC related advice. Instead it was the female part of one of our neighbours. It's easy to make a list containing 20 items that each would qualify as a flaw in character about her. And although my girlfriend agrees she likes her to a good extent, which I only do to a rather small extend. When she told me, though, that they have pulled out their dishwasher to check if it does not work for the same reason as a year before, I saw a chance to support my reputation as a universal genius around the neighborhood in a quick and easy manner. And most of our neighbours are quite nice and you can always use a trump card if you need some good tools or a hand. Or a car with tow hitch.
The problem was soon analyzed and solved. The feet of the dishwasher weren't adjusted properly and pushing it back in this way was indeed impossible. Four minutes later it was screwed in its place again and I got big thanks and told what the problem was. What really made me pity her husband is the way she talks about him. I agree that he is the kind of guy that might have his best match with a rather dominant woman, but if my GF would talk about me in this way, especially when I was around, I'd give her a good amount of verbal backslaps. She described him as pretty much completely unhandy, incapable of solving the tiniest mechanical problems around the house and as acting impatient and dumb. ("When it doesn't work in a way he gets he tends to use force and break things.") Is there much more humiliating you can tell your neighbour about your husband when said neighbour obviously is, on top of everything else, the more intellectual, nerdy type and not your common handy man and of an age you'd expect a man of his age to act belittling towards his experience and skills just because of the age difference alone? I also bet this guy could achieve twice as much as he does now if he had his wife supporting him instead of dooming what he starts as a failure before he even moves his hand.
When I got told what the initial problem was they pulled the dishwasher out for, my greedy self was cringing. They had the same problem a year ago and paid the worth of a new machine for the repair. Now they wanted to exchange the same part and at least just pay the part's price, which would be acceptable. I told them that their problem is easily fixable for less than five bucks.
So soon the machine was back out again and she insisted to show me the instructions to disassemble the part . That gave me the chance to travel back in the early years of the century, with XGA flatscreens, something that seemed to be a slow Pentium IV and Windows XP running with way too less memory. Switching back to the Internet Explorer took the machine half a minute in which you could watch the GDI subsystem draw the window line by line. Of course the disk was rattling madly during swap file access and after maybe 15 seconds the fan started notably blowing. Netburst architecture at its best. The really sad part is that she uses this machine in her office and really works on it on a daily basis. If I would give such a thing to my GF to work with I would consider leaving her if she wouldn't slap me in the face immediately. And no, I do know money is not the issue.
After the half hour in her office was over, 5 minutes were scrolling to the line by line rendered PDF, 30 seconds contained possibly noteworthy information I wouldn't have minded being given, I took the machine apart and decided to also take off some dirty parts not mentioned in the instructions. An hour later everything except the one big part that needed inner cleaning with mild acid or vinegar was disassembled, cleaned and reassembled. In the meantime I heard not only more thanks than I had already gotten while being there, but also that the machines works like new again.
I tried to imagine how I would feel in such a situation if I would be unable to just take out some machine, take a close look to identify at least basic problems and disassemble easy mechanics. Of course, stuff like installing cables and wiring ethernet is not everybody's piece of cake and hardware diagnosis on laptops also is not something one must be able to do. Let alone resolder BGA chips with basic household tools on a two sided PCB. But how can you call yourself a man if a screwdriver and some tweezers are beyond what you can operate?
Yes, what makes a man manly has been defined quite differently during the last centuries and still is seemingly judged differently between men and women, but... WTF?
The lesson I learned from that is that I should be glad that I have two hands and am not just able to move them consciously, but also some mind that is able to transform eyesight into abstraction, apply transformations to abstractions and output the result as a series of hand movements.
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