A handy nomination for an unhandyman
By BILL DUNCAN
The Handyman Club of America from Minnetonka, Minn. has nominated me for membership. I don’t make this stuff up, folks.
Why was I nominated?
Well, the nomination committee said I had been chosen from thousands of handy people. The nomination said it’s no secret among "your friends and family that you are an outstanding handyman." It went on to say in glowing terms that I am passionately devoted to "do-it-yourself home improvement" therefore exactly the kind of person the club is looking for.
The nominating committee surely has not spoken to Dave Cantwell from Tinker’s Well Service. The power in Roseburg went out to my rural home irecently and that meant the well wasn’t pumping water.
The power was restored quickly, but still no water from the well.
I called Dave and he responded. Sure enough the well wasn’t pumping water. He immediately went to the electrical breaker box flipped the switch and magically there was water.
If that was the first time that had happened, one would say, it could happen to any handyman. My wife reminded me of the time when I "fixed" the clothes dryer by installing a new belt on the motor. After the installation, the dryer wouldn’t work. I took the belt off and reapplied it several times. The dryer still didn’t work. I finally gave up and called a repair man and explained everything I had done. He listened. Then gently closed the dryer door and it immediately started. He handed me a repair bill for $35.
Nor did they get an affidavit from Gerretsen Building Supply in Roseburg where I bought some 1 x 12 lumber to build a book shelf and after framing it in, discovered the 1 x 12s were narrow by a few inches in width. I returned to complain I was sold the wrong dimension, only to discover a 1 x 12 is not a 1 x 12 in finished wood. The Gerretsen man felt so sorry for me, he gave me a strip of wood to tack on the board so it would fit my frame.
The letter nominating me said "only serious handymen are nominated. It’s not for lukewarm handymen." I will confess, I am not a lukewarm handyman, I am just an unhandy handyman.
I even fell off my roof and broke both ankles some time ago while building a deck off the second story of my house. That didn’t take any handyman skills, just plain bad luck to step on a board that acted like a see-saw because it was not nailed.
I’ve thought about writing a TV comedy about an unhandy handyman but even my antics probably couldn’t measure up to Tom Poston, the bumbling handyman on the popular situation comedy "Newhart" in the 1950s. I’d have a hard time competing with the reruns of Home Improvement, the TV comedy series about the antics of the Taylor family with Tim Allen. Perhaps the funniest TV series about unhandy handymen is the Red Green show, a parody of do-it-yourself home improvement, aired by CBC television in Canada and occasionally shown on PBS in the U.S. The title character in the show, Red Green, is a lazy handyman who generally tries to find shortcuts, relying heavily on duct tape which he calls "the handyman’s secret weapon."
Actually, my bungling handyman projects are nothing to laugh about and that’s why I find it so incredulous that I would be nominated to the Handyman Club of America, a club reserved only for serious handymen, not those bungling lukewarm handymen.
The invitation did come with a free gift, a drill gauge with holes drilled for the size of the drill bits. That’s good because I never could figure out the difference between 1/16th and a 3/16th, except one was larger than the other.
But I was pretty clever at figuring out why I was nominated. The clue was in the printed invitation and I am quite handy at understanding the written word. Plainly, it said on the nomination form: "Don’t bother to send money. Your membership dues are so low that its easier to bill you later."
I don’t need a hammer and a screwdriver to figure that one out, but I sure would like to know who nominated me.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)