The Older You Get, The Smarter Your Old Man Got
This story isn’t about me being a dumbass; I have no shortage of those, but I can’t think of one where, in the middle of being stupid, I figured out the easier solution. No, this is about me watching somebody doing something the hard way, and providing the better approach.
My wife and I were visiting one of her friends. I was sent into the kitchen to help the friend’s husband make guacamole. Apparently he was proud of his recipe, and, knowing my interest in cooking, he wanted my comments.
I watched as he lined up three or four avocados on the counter. Then he got out a paring knife. Me, I prefer a chef’s knife, but some people like smaller blades, so I didn’t say anything.
Then he picked up the first avocado and began slowly, laboriously using the paring knife to peel it, like you’d hand-peel an apple or a potato.
I watched silently, feeling uncertainty and confusion. Was this a joke? Was he putting me on?
He wasn’t even getting proper peels. The avocado skin was being removed in little pieces, ranging between dime-sized and thumbprint-sized, and each bit of peel was being cut away with a lot of delicious avocado meat on the back. I watched, perplexed at first, and then struggling to restrain laughter.
He finished the first one, and I decided I had to say something. “Would you like to know an easier way to do that?” I offered, as neutrally as possible.
He glanced up, surprised. “Yes, of course,” he said, quite earnestly. It wasn’t a put-on.
I got a chef’s knife, and I showed him the trick of halving the avocado lengthwise, slapping the knife into the pit and twisting it out, and then cubing the flesh inside the peel, before scooping everything out with a soup spoon. And he watched me, wide-eyed, like I was performing wizardry.
Thinking back, I guess it’s not terribly surprising he didn’t know how to break down an avocado. He was an immigrant, having come to the US only a few years before, and had probably never seen an avocado or held one before that, let alone tried to cut one up. He had a deft hand grinding spices in his mortar and pestle, so it was simple inexperience, not skill. (And for the record, his finished guacamole was quite tasty.)
But my swirl of conflicting feelings during that long silent minute as I watched him clumsily peeling the skin off the avocado will stick with me forever.
In my first proper job, there was something of a culture of late nights. I ahd managed to avoid this until the day I found myself confronted with a massive Excel file, one column of which was fouling up a formula because each cell contained a double space. It had to be fixed, so I stayed in the office past normal hours, clicking on each cell in turn and manually deleting the extra space. There were thousands of rows. It took forever, not least because I woudl of course get bored and lose focus before forcing myself to get back to it. It was torture, and I didn’t get it done till past 10pm. But! I felt that I had at least shown diligence and commitment to getting the job done.
The next day, I was talking to a friend and told him about my shitty evening, and he looked at me with an air of surprise and bafflement and said waht so many of you thought on reading the first para:
“Why didn’t you just use find and replace?”
I have never felt like such a goddam moron in my life. Not least because I knew about find and replace before that evening, it just dropped out of my skull for five hours when I needed it.
A new bbq was due for it’s first real clean, so I fumbled around looking for ways to remove the grease-bowl underneath the cooking bit. Think Webber BBQ.
Nothing jumped out at me, so I tried removing the bbq unit from the stand, but the grease-bowl remained. I unscrewed every screwy screw, but the grease-bowl stayed put. I tried ringing the store where we’d bought the bloody thing, but they weren’t answering their phones, bastids.
After many hours of cursing, grunting and feelings of despair, I did a youtube search. Bloody grease-bowl just untwists from the bottom of the cooking chamber. Literally 30 seconds, and the thing was done.
BBQ got a good clean though.
Ha ha! My wife eats avocados that way. Even after I have shown her the halving method more than once. Some habits are hard to break, I guess.
At my first job after college, in 1993: my office had a drop ceiling, and there was a 24" X 48" fluorescent light fixture in it. One of the bulbs burned out. Instead of calling maintenance, I decided to change it myself.
I got a ladder, climbed up, and proceeded to remove the 24" X 48" plastic bezel/diffuser. Was gently bending it, trying to get it out. It was really difficult, because I didn’t want to break the diffuser. I finally got it out after about 15 minutes.
It was then that I noticed two, small latches on the metal frame of the cover. I unlatched them and the entire cover swung down on hinges. Huh.
If we’re counting other people doing things the hard way, a friend of the family once tried making yarn dolls by cutting each individual strand of yarn, one at a time. You actually wrap the yarn around a card, and then cut all the strands at once.
This reminded me of something that happened to me not 2 weeks age-- not sure if it’s ‘doing it the hard way’ or just more of an ‘I’m a dumbass’ story…
I had a big cartful of groceries I had just purchased and was heading out to the parking lot. Just as I was leaving the store, the wheels seized up and it became almost impossible to push. I sized up my options-- leave my cart where it was, go get a new cart and switch out all the groceries, or just strong-arm it? I chose the latter. I struggled and brute-forced this cart, sometimes getting the wheels to roll a bit, but mostly they just skidded on the pavement. It was a hell of a workout. It was around 90 out and I was sweating profusely.
By the time I almost got to my vehicle (which was not parked close) someone said “those carts have an anti-theft function that locks up the wheels if you try to take the cart away from the lot. They often malfunction and lock up in the lot. You can get a store employee to unlock it”.
However, it does not work the other way around! My wife and I bought a juicer at a yard sale recently. It was a hand press type similar to a lime press I had, but the lime one was plastic, and so small it only fit small limes. This one was metal and large enough for large lemons or possibly smallish oranges too.
Then a couple days later I find my son, who likes to cook, and loves lots of garlic, is in the kitchen straining to use the new juicer. I ask him what’s going on. He had loaded it with like 5 or 6 cloves or garlic-- he thought it was a larger, multi-clove garlic press…
One last, second-hand example, is a young upcoming guitar player I heard being interviewed on NPR years ago. He had listened to and been inspired by Chet Atkins (I think), and didn’t realize that the echoing, secondary notes he was hearing were caused by delay or slap-back reverb. So he taught himself to play just like he heard Chet by playing every note twice, the second time with slightly less volume. And it sounded just like the effect.
One Xmas I had ordered a turkey from a reliable, popular local butcher.
The butchers let everyone know that they would hand out the turkeys at a certain time one morning.
So there was a polite queue of customers and a similar number of labelled turkeys (all paid for.)
The butcher started off by asking the person at the front of the queue their name. He then burrowed through loads of turkeys until he found the right one. (This took some time as you can imagine.)
Before he could repeat the process, I called out “Excuse me - it’ll be much faster if you pick up a turkey, call out the name on it and hand it over!”
And so we all got our turkeys quickly… 
No, no, just ask for the names, and then tell the turkey with that name to come forward! Let those lazy birds do their share of the work.
I was pushing a rolling display counter at the grocery store and it was very heavy and hard to push. That is, until the front end manager came over and unlocked the wheels. Then it was easy.
We put in a new kitchen counter, sink and faucet. We try to do as much as we can do ourselves to save money, so we’ve done quite a few DIYs over the years. There are ALWAYS issues of some sort but we figure them out and finish the job. The new counter and sink were in. We now had to install the faucet. We bought a faucet that is just one piece. the handle is attached to the faucet. My husband installed the last kitchen faucet and a few bathroom faucets so this wasn’t a new venture. I like reading directions and it’s usually a good thing I do because he tends to shoot from the hip. So I read through the instructions. My husband’s back is bad so I ended up under the sink. It went fairly smoothly, just a little hard for me to reach up past the sink. My husband hooked up the water lines and turned them on. The big moment had arrived. I turned the handle (it’s verticle) and nothing happened. I kept turning it back and forth but no water came out of the faucet. I questioned my husband - you turned the water back on right? Yep. Did you turn off anything in the basement? Nope. I combed through the directions again. We had done everything correctly. The faucet must be faulty. My husband called the store we bought it from and explained the issue. The guy said - I’ve never heard of that happening. It’s now close to suppertime on Sunday. We had been living without a kitchen for most of the weekend and we were at the end of our ropes. So we took out the new faucet. I went back to the store and bought a different faucet/brand but the same style. This one caught my eye because it said “Save Your Back” on the box. This one was installed from the top of the sink. Sign me up! So we got the new one installed pretty quickly, turned the water back on, turned the handle AND nothing. Same thing, no water. Same questions asked. Same answers. We both went over the instructions numerous times. I stood and stared at the faucet trying to figure it out. I went to turn the faucet again, but this time I kind of moved it outward instead of up and down (not on purpose, it just happened). Water, glorious water poured out of the faucet. I almost cried. I turned it off and could barely speak, I was so excited. I yelled to my husband - oh my god, oh my god. He had no idea what was going on. I said - come here! He came into the kitchen and I casually, lightly flipped the faucet to the side and watched the water stream out. We were the two happiest people on Earth at that moment. I hadn’t returned the first faucet yet because I didn’t want to waste time standing in line. So I opened the box and tried the same movement on that faucet. Sure enough, that’s how that one worked too. UGH
After moving in with my gf, mowing with the Kubota lawn tractor became my job. The 3rd or 4th time I mowed, the blade drive belt tore. Damn. I went to an auto parts store and bought a belt. Laying under the side I struggled and eventually got the belt on.
I started the Kubota up and drove out of the garage. I started the blades and the belt flew off. Drove back into the garage, struggled to get the belt back on. Once again when I started the blades the belt flew off.
So, I decided to RTFM. Turns out I had a tensioner pulley in the wrong position. Belt placement was way easier with everything done correctly.
When I bought my house it had that same kind of faucet. Took me quite a while to figure it out. Up is hot, down is cold, out is actually get water.
Then it must have been a real thrill for my HS junior English teacher to have me in class. I was always marginal when it came to grammar and hopeless when it came to diagramming sentences. But I had just finished two years of Latin classes, and apparently it sunk in. The first day he started in on grammar, I was sitting in my usual rear seat, ready to be bored, when he pointed to a word in the sentence and said “what part of speech is this?” Something clicked in my brain and I blurted out “That’s the direct object!” He looked startled at the outburst, but quickly confirmed that it was correct. And suddenly the whole structure of the language fell into place for me. I only wish that had happened with physics.
That makes me feel much better, we’re not the only ones!
My step daughter was mowing her yard one day when her boyfriend came over and noticed that she was really struggling to push it. He showed her how to use the little paddles on the handle to engage the self propel. She had been mowing that way for years and had no idea.
(Having just recently had the self propel on my own mower stop working - the belt had slipped off the pulley - I can attest to the fact that pushing a self-propelled mower without the self propel is much harder than not having self propel at all.)
I did something much dumber when I was new to using chainsaws-- I had a couple chains sharpened at a local shop, and when I placed one back on, it was dull as hell-- worse than before I had it sharpened!
For a second I was about to make an angry call-- then decided to take a second look. Of course, I had put the blade on backwards-- the little illustration on the chain cover plate clearly showed the proper tooth direction.
Ouch! I feel your pain.
I was once putting a new chain on my saw and I sliced my thumb, pretty nasty. I managed to close the laceration with butterflies, but didn’t have any bandaids to cover it. So, I used a bunch of gauze and medical tape.
My bandaged thumb looked cartoonish. When people asked what happened I answered, “chainsaw” which was true, but people thought I was joking and laughed.
I don’t understand. To peel an avocado you make two incisions lengthwise at ~90° to each other all the way around. Then you pull the skin off. If it does not come off, the avocado is not ripe anyway.
Do you eat avocados unripe in the USA?