September 5, 2022
Greetings from the truth hacks,
I have a built-in workbench in my garage, an altar to industriousness, with all manner of storage for tools and parts and projects. It is a fine specimen of organization, featuring drawers and shelves and boxes, all evenly coated with dust from unuse, which good intentions have not disturbed.
Featured prominently among this display of hypocrisy is an upright, square metal display featuring sixty small clear drawers. It is described as a ‘Parts Organizer’, often featured in optimistic articles like ’10 Hacks for an Effective Workbench’. (As a sidenote, I am starting a petition to have the word ‘hack’ reclaimed as a word meaning ‘cut with rough or heavy blows, to cut, chop, hew’. You can sign it below.)
Before the days when people were hacking their marriages, recipes, children, religions, etc., I bought this organizer for screws and nails and small things I don’t want to forget I have.
When I purchased it, heart full of naïve intention, already envisioning satisfying hours of creating and repairing things with my hands, I had very few small things to manage. This was many years ago, perhaps the Reagan era, which I mention not because of the optimism involved or the fact I was so flush with trickle-down cash I could afford such a luxury, but simply to establish how old this device is. What’s really astonishing is not just the age, but also that I still have it despite the fact it is has proven to be utterly useless.
I think it was a denim blue color originally, an irrelevant fact I thought I’d include to confuse you in the off chance you are still reading hoping to uncover a ‘hack’. In some moments, I enjoy seeing it there on the bench, a piece of art, protecting a small rectangle of space from dust. It is a little apartment for loose screws. It is a refuge for orphaned nuts. It is a resting place for errant rivets. It is a mausoleum for miscellanea.
Inside the drawers are a mélange of detritus. There are fuses from an era when houses had fuses. There are spacers and washers, nuts, screws, nails, bolts, hooks. There is a hinge. There are S-hooks and cup hooks and suction cup hooks. There are mollies and brackets and bearing rings. There is a spring. There are many examples of the widowed remains of a pair.
There are several parts of something that I deliberately put in there, knowing that I would need them one day. That is my self-imposed curse, this empty promise that I made to myself in more innocent times.
Occasionally I will need to fix something and discover I need, say, a corksprocket. The last thing I want to do is make a trip to the hardware store to buy a box of corksprockets when I already own some. So, a little diligence is necessary.
I will go to the little drawers and look in the windows, which is merely a warmup exercise. There is no way of telling what is in each drawer by looking through the scarred plastic ends. Everything looks like corksprockets from that perspective, and I will testify that truth disguises another truth.
In order to determine that other truth, one must open sixty drawers.
I will also confess that I cannot open sixty little drawers without forgetting which of the sixty I have opened, leaving some doubt as to the veracity of my inventorying and the potential existence of corksprockets. This leads to opening and closing the sixty drawers something like one hundred times, having little reunions with my various tenants, who have no more memory of me than I of them.
I will also acknowledge that partway through this process I forget that I am looking for corksprockets. Occasionally I will have a false ‘Eureka’ moment for an 8mm locknut, which perhaps in other circumstances might be a happy discovery. If only I had an authentic need for my old friend.
Those of you with advanced degrees in statistics, or actuarial analysis, or perhaps astrology, might estimate that opening the drawers one hundred times would not be necessary if I actually found the corksprockets at some point. And so, you have discovered the other truth about the sixty drawers: they never ever have what you are looking for.
I’ll confess even as I begin the search process I know the futility, and yet I do it. It may be a psychological compulsion, or masochistic hopefulness, or perhaps the powerful parsimony that drives it all: I don’t want to waste another $1.89 on corksprockets that may, against all odds, reside in the library of misfit parts. There may come a day when I put down this burden, but not while I have the need for money or incidental pieces of repairable
possessions which I could probably more economically replace with new. Or do without.
Henry Thoreau probably said: “Do not own more things than you can remember.” If he didn’t it is because he didn’t own a ‘Parts Organizer’, and he lived in the pristine days before corksprockets. Ah, let us return to Walden, where there was no reason for tiny plastic windows and the only hacking was caused by the need for firewood.
Hope this finds you seeing where you looked,
David
Copyright © 2022 David Smith
Comments