No More Mr. Fixit

First published April 1, 2005

Some guys are “handy,” meaning that if you give one of them a hammer he will be able to hold it in his “hand” without dropping it through a glass coffee table. If you ask him to fix a leak under the sink he can fix it without having to replace the entire west half of the house. If you need a loose screw tightened he can do it without necessarily drawing blood.

I am not one of those handy guys. I believe that if God had intended for me to use a screwdriver, he would have given me the ability. Or at least the desire.


A handy guy is easy to spot in his natural habitat. Within an hour of moving into a house that most people would consider perfectly satisfactory, he will have the bathtub sitting out in the driveway, filled with all the old wiring and light fixtures from the family room. He just can’t leave well enough alone.

On the other hand, I firmly believe that “alone” is absolutely where you should leave well enough. This philosophy makes life a lot simpler for me and millions of other fixit-challenged men. For instance, if there is a blemish on a wall – like a hole from, say, a nail or a mortar round – the handy guy will rebuild the wall, maybe adding on a spare bathroom while he’s at it. I’ll just hang a picture over the hole – or maybe a poster in the case of the mortar round.

The irony here is that, like all men, I have the “Cool Tool Gene,” meaning that I love wandering around in Sears, saying things like, “Four and a half horses in this baby – cool!” I can spend hours gazing at drills, log splitters, table saws, and air compressors. I think tools, especially the ones that represent substantial destructive capacity, are terrific, and I even own some. I just know better than to turn them on without proper supervision.

Now it may seem ideal live with a handy guy. After all, if the dog digs a hole in the back yard, this man will dig it out a little more and turn it into a swimming pool. The only drawback is that these guys never seem to get anything completely finished. Two years after the dog kicks off that project there might be water in the pool, but Mr. Buildit is still trying to round up enough plutonium for the nuclear pool heater.

Please notice that I’m just talking about men, on both ends of the handiness spectrum. This is because women who are handy are usually not obsessive about it. If a light switch needs to be fixed and a woman knows how to do it, she will quietly take care of it without bringing down the Midwest power grid. And if she doesn’t know how to do it, she will quietly call an electrician.

So I have a message for all you handy guys out there. Just because you know how “to sweat a joint” in a water pipe – or even know what that means – doesn’t mean that you have to go around doing it.

If you have a funny Mr. Fixit story to tell me, send it to mike@learnedsofar.com.

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball