I’ll never fix our smoke alarm so it’s just as well the taps leak

I have friends who are practical. They can fix stuff – change washers and lightbulbs, plane lintels, pre-program the coffee machine, outsmart the smart TV, change a spark plug, top up the oil and the windscreen water, orient an aerial, hang pictures, screw shelves together, work the microwave. I turn away. Mechanical competence repulses me. One friend can name five different types of screwdriver. Five. Well, screw him. A man who has memorised five varieties of one tool is an unserious man, a man who has never contemplated Uganda’s plight or watched an antechinus at foreplay on YouTube.

When rat-shrill caterwauling fills his house he quickly surveys all the rooms to find out which smoke alarm is falsely alarming him and gets his stepladder and takes the nine-volt battery from the alarm and inserts a new one and reattaches the alarm to the ceiling with a half turn and an “Oh … it’s nothing” grin.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

I never do this. I sniff the air. If it’s smoke-free I ignore the alarm until a daughter yells at me. This doesn’t take long. I then denounce the patriarchy and search unsuccessfully for a stepladder. Settling for a wonky stool, I yank the smoke alarm’s screws from the ceiling plaster as I’m falling and send it ricocheting into the fireplace. Luckily the fire is unlit.

Blowing the ash off the alarm, I announce the battery flat. “Flat as,” I say, just to drive home my expertise in electrical matters. I don’t have a spare. Somehow, I never do, though batteries are bought in multiples. I set the alarm aside. Very aside. Rescrewing it into the plaster is not a task that is beneath me, but the glass-topped coffee table is, and I nearly fell through it while hauling the alarm out of the plaster in the first place.

So, I put the smoke alarm on the backburner with the countless other tasks fated to kill or humiliate me. If my house burns down there will be an inquisition and it will damn me as a cretin adrift in modernity. And it will wonder (though it is not usually given to an inquisition to wonder) how my house burnt when all the taps drip like nascent Niagaras and outside in the sun the irrigation system is a copse of inexhaustible rainbows even when switched, firmly, off. Why do my taps drip? Because I rate the danger of changing a washer as way too high to offset the inconvenience of a dripping tap.

I finally understood this risk/reward calculus the day I tried to fix our trickling shower and ended up losing my cool and making a hole in the bathroom wall that looked like a cat flap for a sabre-toothed behemoth. Shaq O’Neal could burgle our house via the shower now. He’d get wet, though, because it still trickles.

When automotive trouble strikes I treat it like a movie, a thriller, the whole thing is already in the can, written, acted, preordained, and I’m just here to view it until the credits role. Let it play out. Let the bastard smoke and whine, there’s no alternative. Earlier this year I drove a 4WD 200 kilometres with no brakes. It was easier than looking under the bonnet and saying, “Hmmm …” and then driving 200 kilometres with no brakes.

I’m at ease with not understanding engines. The people who do are generally misanthropes found lying splay-legged on their backs in oil spills resembling lifeblood while goggling at a heaven of cylinders, pistons and gears. Carpenters deal in precision. I don’t. They measure angles. I can’t. They glue things together that I glue to myself. Plumbing is a turd-juggling slapstick, and I note plumbers, though they occasionally attempt to befriend humans, mostly socialise with plumbers. Electricity, to me, is a type of magic better left to its flinching magicians with their singed lashes and six-easy-payment headstones.

I’m admitting my shortcomings in these practical affairs to send a message of support to the similarly clueless and clumsy out there. The societal prejudice against us has risen to a crescendo just as a castor has come off my recliner. I know it’s wrong, by the proud code of the DIY braggart, to go out and buy another recliner. I also know it’s my only option. In this age in which ableism is rightly denounced, I am proudly maladroit. I’m not Bob the Builder – I’m the Achilles of klutzes. I can’t fix it. With me, all stuck windows lead to Pompeii.

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