The Means at Your Disposal

I'd been avoiding working on the lawn mower, though it badly needed servicing. To be honest with you, I don't like working on internal combustion engines. I'll work on most anything - household appliances, plumbing, electrical, central air conditioning, home dentistry, furniture, gardening, whatever. But please don't ask me to try to fix an internal combustion engine. I don't know why I'm the way I am in this matter; I just am. Love me nonetheless.

Anyhow, I'd run out of excuses by which to bamboozle the longsuffering Mrs. Smith about the lawn mower. I think she became suspicious of me when I told her the problem was the flux capacitor not getting the 1.21 gigawatts it needed to operate properly. So, I decided to fiddle with the mower just long enough to get my hands dirty, at which point I'd tell Mrs. Smith we needed a new mower. Well, when I rehearsed my plan, and I got to the "we need a new mower" part, I knew I had outraged my true nature: I buy nothing new, if 1) there's the slightest hope I can repair the old one, or 2) I can build a new one. I highly resolved that though it slay me, I was gonna fix that #!%*@~ mower.

I started taking the thing apart, and I was pretty sure I'd found the general area where the problem resided. But I had no idea how to explain what was going on with it, or what parts I would need. I knew that the place from which I usually buy hardware automatically charges a $30 bench fee to diagnose lawn mower problems, in addition to the parts and labor costs required to fix it. Ouch! Un-friggin'-acceptable! So, rather than haul the mower to them, I decided to break out my digital camera and use it to video record the action of the mechanism that I figured was the source of the problem. I took the camera to the store and played the video for the lawn mower repair guy. He immediately knew what the problem was. He then brought me the parts I needed to fix it, along with an exploded diagram of the mower section I'd be working on.

About an hour and $9 later, my mower was purring like a kitten. I felt like such a he-man.

My point in all this is to encourage you to use the means at your disposal to get the results you want. In this case, I used my digital camera to get an expert to look at my mower, without having to pay him to "really" look at my mower. And by doing so, I saved some serious coin AND gained some good experience.

You can, too.