Stay out of that mixer. That way lies madness!!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

My daughter is in her first year of Jr. College and I pretty proud of the way she’s cleaned up her act from her high school days. She’s getting decent grades and seems to be enjoying herself. She also lost some baby fat and at 5’11" is down to 175 lbs, and her face structure and shape are quite attractive. Classically beautiful even. She’s even getting love “poems” from an infatuated boy she’s friends with.

She’s heavily into electronic music, and is so invested in turntables, DJ hardware, and bedroom mixing my pet nickname for her is “The Cartridge Queen”. She’s a little bit of a geek like me and tries to fix things herself. Her favorite present is a 256 meg thumb drive I gave her, that she wears around her neck, and keeps her music and college papers on.

So everything seemed to be going fine until yesterday, when I picked her up from college yesterday. “What’s that?” I asked as she got into the car. “It’s a mixer!” she said brightly. “I can see that I replied, but it’s not your mixer. Why does it have a sticky note on it that says “BROKEN! Elizabeth Please Fix!””?

“Oh I told one of the guys in the computer club I’d look at it for him.” she said. I’ll hook it up to my system, and see if it’s something simple like a setting he’s messed up."

Proud of her can do attitude, and yet mindful of how these things often go, I took deep breath and said “You don’t want to do that.” Why not?" she asked. Look at me Elizabeth. I make a decent livng as a commercial real estate agent, and yet I look back now and realize how many hours, days, months and years I wasted poking around inside PCs trying to fix peoples junk. You need to concentrate on your studies. if you get the reputation for being a hardware fix it wizard, every sick little piece of hardware will be bundled up for you to look at. Huge, giant, enormous chunks of your life will be gobbled up because you feel an obligation to help people fix their crappy hardware. If I could have every hour back that spent screwing around wth PCs, I would have sold uncounted millions of dollars worth of real estate with that time, or spent the time outdoors, or living life. Fixing broken crap for free, or even a few dollars, is a no win place to be Elizabeth."

“But I’m just trying to help!” She replied, exasperated at my glurge.

“OK, but you’ve got to promise me one thing!” I muttered darkly “You will not unscrew the cover, and start poking around with the contacts”! If it’s not the settings you will hand it back!" “But I’ve got a screwdriver!” she said. “PROMISE ME!” I barked. Don’t go inside that mixer, that way lies madness!"

“'Sigghh… Okaayy. I won’t go inside it.”

I know she’s lying to me, but at least I feel better. The lie comforts me.

2

I’ve done that all my life. In college, I ended up working as the fix-it guy in the AV lab of one of the departments on campus. So I got to keep taking stuff apart and trying to fix it, but I also got paid for it. Plus, nobody got all angry and surly if I ended up unable to fix it (or, as I only grudgingly admit even after ten years, making the problem worse).

3

Nothing to do with mixers, but Mr.Iceland kindly begs that he be considered suitable to woo this young maiden :cool:

4

Well, if it makes her happy to help people, I don’t see why she should stop.
:slight_smile:

“Being obsessed with money is the true path to madness.”

Even as I say this, scenes from *Boiler Room * continue to haunt me and undermine my thoughts on the subject.
:stuck_out_tongue:

5

:confused:

I opened this thread to see whether you were talking about the kind of mixer you use to make cake batter, or the activity where you try to get a whole bunch of people to get together and meet each other.

6

Yeah, me too. I thought this was going to be “I don’t want her to go to this party, because it’s not a good party.”

:confused: One for me, too.

7

I was thinking Tom Collins or Bloody Mary mixers. Alcohol on the brain, I suppose…

8

You seem like a nice enough fellow, but I know your your type. You’re a mixer fixer, and would be a bad influence on her. A stong “handiness” aura surrounds you like stink on a monkey. I knew your kind, with your pliers, and your screwdrivers, and your multi-tools. It ain’t happening!

I want her to use her mad digital photo layup and drawing skillz to go into advertising. She needs a disaffected. languid artist type to point her that way.

9

Aw, I was thinking it was a KitchenAid. Which I would surely have torn apart and dug into by now, if someone gave me one that needed fixing. Because I love me a good KitchenAid.

It didn’t even occur to me that it could be some computer thingummy. What’s that kind of mixer?

10

You may want to reconsider that, astro. I love Mr Neville dearly, but neither of us has any “handy” skills whatsoever. We both used our mad skillz to get graduate degrees in astronomy.

This isn’t so much of a problem now- we rent an apartment and the landlord strongly discourages us from trying to fix stuff by ourselves, and my dad can come to help us if we need to do something like put up curtains. But we want to buy a place someday, and my dad lives 3000 miles away. Not being able to cope with a “fixer-upper” and not being independently wealthy really limits our options, living in the SF Bay Area…

11

I should probably also say that I thought this thread was about kitchen mixers, too. I thought it would be something about licking batter off the beaters (while the mixer was running?), though, not about repairing the mixer. :eek:

12

May I add that I thought you were taling about a party too from the title…
and I’ve just started on the exec of a student radio station!

I don’t see why you should stop her helping people fix things. It might even be a more important route to a future career than conventional study is.

13

Out of curiosity, what’s up with telling us her height, weight and looks when all it’s about is her handiness with electronic stuff? What a bizarre opening paragraph.

14

And then telling us we can’t woo her.

Seriously. :wally

15

I would have thought my multi-tools would have improved my prospects :smiley:

16

You’re talking to a man whose daughter has “mad digital photo layup and drawing skillz.” I assume the former are associated with her height in some way but I’m not a techie, so I’m not sure.