It’s always satisfying to have one of the central axioms you live by confirmed.
For me, this weekend it was: “If you want something done right, you’ve got to hire someone else to do it.”
I painted my 2-year-old son’s room. At first glance, it looks fine. But if you get closer and examine the walls, you’ll understand why I’m telling people that my 2-year-old did the job. “He wanted to do it! Not bad for a toddler, eh? Plus, he only fell off the ladder twice.”
The worst part is, the painting took three days and cost as much as — if not more than — if I had done the responsible thing and hired stoned 17-year-old professionals to handle the job.
Now, it may be that there’s nothing simpler than painting a room. It may be that I’m an idiot. I hope that possibility is implicit in every column I write.
But if you ask me, the do-it-yourself strain in our culture has gotten out of hand, guilt-tripping incompetents like myself — who are best-suited for sitting in cubicles managing our last-place fantasy baseball teams all day — into doing things we have no business doing.
Part of the blame must lie with the growing how-to industry. With profit its only concern, this industry, through stores such as Home Depot and shows such as “Supernanny,” seeks to convince us amateurs and novices that we aren’t fully alive unless we’re tackling such delicate tasks as fixing our homes and raising our children.
But we hardly need convincing. Going back to our forefathers, who all but rid the continent of buffalo on their own without seeking professional buffalo removers, “rugged American individualism” has ruled the day.
The truth is, though, that when all factors are taken into consideration, from cost and quality to mental well-being and family stability, it’s never a good idea to exert effort on anything.
As I mathematically proved in this space long ago, financially you’re even better off never washing socks, but rather wearing new socks until they’re dirty and then throwing them out and buying new socks.
Cooking clearly isn’t cost-effective. My family has finally realized this; now we buy a rotisserie chicken on Sundays and spend the rest of the week huddled around it, gnawing away like a pack of wolves.
Pretty soon, my intricate cost-time-effort formula shows, the same will be true of traditionally more expensive products, like, say, TVs. Rather than exerting effort to turn off your TV, it eventually will be more beneficial to buy and have delivered (and turned on) a new TV after every viewing.
That’s the upside of having all our products made in China. (The downside is our pets die and we stop brushing our teeth.)
I realize I’m getting slightly off my point here, which, essentially, is to persuade you to stop your do-it-yourself projects before things get more out of hand and someday I find myself hearing my wife say something like, “But Justin built their new refrigerator.”
Granted, in today’s world, you still usually have to pay professionals more. This weekend, for example, we also got our 2-year-old a haircut. The haircut cost $20 and lasted, at most, eight minutes. Lawyers, psychiatrists, consultants — they all do well and deserve no pity. But no one bills as much per hour as the toddler hairstylist.
Next time, to get my money’s worth, I’ll ask my son’s stylist after she is done to glue his hair back on and re-cut it.
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MEbazer@gmail.com
