Who Needs a Hammer?

By Rory McClannahan

Words come in both negative and positive connotations. “Beauty” is a positive word and “ugly” is a negative word. When it comes to assigning those connotations most of us can agree on sets of the positive versus negative words. “War” bad, “love” good.

That’s why I chafe a bit when someone calls me fussy. It’s almost as if fussiness is just a nice way of saying obsessive compulsive, which we know falls in the negative column due to the word “disorder” that usually follows behind. So, it is with a small amount of trepidation that I admit that I can be fussy about some things.

Anyone who comes to my house would notice immediately that I’m not fussy about many things – there is always a chance there are dirty dishes in the sink or that the floor should be swept. When it comes to the soap dish in my shower, though, I’m a regular fussbudget. Like most right-thinking people, I use bar soap, which leaves a residue in the dish. I know, the simple answer is to just use body wash, but I never feel clean when I use it.

See? Fussy.

Some years ago, I bought a cheap plastic soap dish that easily came apart into a top half and a bottom half. However, I had to make some modifications to assure that my soap would be stored properly when I wasn’t using it. A soap dish, as you all know, is a dish. That means that if water gets into it, it will not drain out. When a bar of soap sits in a dish of water, it gets soft and slimy, a disgusting state for which I do not care for. It makes me feel that the soap is somehow tainted. (Don’t get me started on a stray hair being trapped in the bar.)

Obviously, there tends to be some water that will get into the soap dish during the course of a shower. The simple thing to do would be to tip the water out of the dish before stepping out of the stall, but I usually have a lot of things on my mind and can’t be expected to remember everything.

Something had to be done and in my case it was drilling a series of holes that allows water to drain out of the dish. This leads to other problems such as a build up of soap under the dish, and every couple of months the holes will get clogged. Usually, a quick scrape with my thumbnail will do the trick, but at some point all the soap scum on the dish and the shower wall needs a deep cleaning. Fortunately, cleaning built up soap is pretty easy and there is the same satisfaction of mowing grass after the task is completed.

In the latest iteration of soap dish scraping, I grabbed the first suitable tool I could find – an old dental picker, the type with a sharp point on one end and a flosser on the other. It did a good a good job on the task at hand and in a very small way made me proud to be a human being, that with my brain and my hands and a tool I can accomplish a complex task. Some might think that that cleaning a soap dish is hardly a complex task, and it is compared to building a rocket ship. But can a bear clean a soap dish? Actually, could you even convince a bear to take a shower?

The greatness of human beings is that we not only use tools, we also make them. I’ve been thinking a lot about tools lately because I’ve been catching up on those household chores that have been on the to-do list for some time. One of those chores has been installing baseboards and window moldings. I’ve been working on painting and updating the house for a couple of years and enjoy the do-it-yourself aspect of it.

Not only am I a world-class procrastinator, I’m also pretty inept with a nail and hammer. My measuring and cutting skills leave much to be desired as well. Wielding a hammer means that my fat fingers usually end up taking the brunt of the blows and I’m pretty fussy about hurting myself. However, the baseboards won’t get done by themselves and I decided to get an electric brad nailer. I found a pretty good deal on one and found that I could install baseboard fairly quickly. The total time to do the project was about five years and 10 minutes. I should have made that purchase years ago.

Although nailers aren’t anything new, I am still amazed by this device. It runs off a battery – no need to get a fancy pneumatic nailer – and slams a brad into the wall instantly after pulling the trigger. It even has a little light that illuminates where you want to put that nail.

I’m sure you’ve figured out by now that I like tools, any sort of tool. Tools somehow make me optimistic about the human race, even when you consider that the first tool that humans used was probably something designed to kill someone. While I would never condone violence, it was that violence in our formative years and have placed humans in command of a planet.

How cleaver are we? Or brilliant minds have enabled use to move out of caves and mud huts to create buildings that reach to the heavens, cradling us in comfort. We have built tools that have taken us to the stars and makes and washes our clothes and takes us from point A to point B. We’ve created tools that allows us to talk to just about anyone in the world right now.

We created a simple device that enables us to pick crap out of our teeth. And clean soap dishes.

Along the way, we found that our tools could be used to entertain us. Our communication tools are now used to beam sights and sounds into our homes and into devices we carry in our pockets. It’s nothing short of amazing that my telephone can be used to talk to someone, as well as let me play a game or offer some other form of entertainment. If you would have told me with I was a teenager that one day I would carry a computer in my pocket I would have told you that was crazy talk.

What’s more amazing is that I can now send an 18 gauge nail into a wall at a rate of one per second and not smack my finger in the process.

As incredible as that sounds, I’m optimistic that in the future I’ll find a soap dish that cleans the gunk out of itself. In the meantime, I guess I’ll use the flosser. Like I said, I’m only fussy about some things.