Life is a results-driven game and fixing a door-knob proves it.
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Yes, there's rhetoric around how you play the game, and the score not mattering. But that rhetoric means nothing when a door-knob falls off the door. To the floor, with a loud bang. Rendering the door unoppenable, or closable, depending on which side of the door you're on.
What we now have is a results-driven example of something needing to be done. Otherwise how will the house seal in the morning when you turn the heater on?
The door-knob had been dangling for years really, as they do. Whoever had put it on originally hadn't done much of a job.
But the door had worked, loosely, and that had represented an open and shut case of 'near enough is good enough'.
That all changed when whatever was holding the door knob to the door - let's call it faith - had fallen away.
Now life demanded we get a handle on the handle. Otherwise one door might close and another door might not open.
The same door actually.
But what of a door-knob and it's mysterious internals. What makes it do what it does, apart from faith?
This was the question he who was entrusted with finding a fix had asked. Let's call him 'the knob-master'. In advance. Because the knob hadn't been mastered yet.
At that moment there had just been that question about how does it work, faith, and a few bits and pieces that had fallen out of the door cavity. In no particular order.
Let's call that disorder.
Peering into that door-knob cavity, knob-master had been humbled, yet again, by how little he knew about door knobs.
Indeed, not since trying to sync a universal remote control to an old TV had he stared into such a deep and dark void.
Already there was negative feedback coming his way. Maybe he shouldn't have tried fixing this bedroom door-knob just as someone had been trying to go to sleep.
If you were good at going to sleep during the fertive "clickety-clicks" of a Phillips-head screwdriver, and the grunting and deep breathing that come with repeated failure, that wouldn't have been a problem.
If you were not, then knob-master was probably going to keep you awake.
Perhaps ajar, in this context.
Unable to shut out the frustration of someone with a bee in their bonnett, and thus unable to slide into slumber to dream of things being fixed around the house without a meltdown.
Dream on.
Knob-master preferred to liken his hissy fits to the sound of failure leaking out of his core. Replaced eventually by a form of success that only ever seems to come with bloody-minded persistence.
But eventually something clicked, and no-one was more surprised than knob-master to find it was the door-knob.
Secured once more to the door of perception. That perception being it was actually fixed, to the door. Bloody miracle.
Proving yet again, that all rhetoric aside, life is a results-driven game.