Bad Electrician
A 500 word, 500 second column.
I'm not a good electrician.
When I was a wee boy, my parents used to give me things. Electrical things with lots of screws and nuts, and I'd sit there for hours with a screwdriver taking them apart. At that age, putting them back together wasn't even a consideration.
Sometimes, when someone gave me electric toys, I'd just end up taking them apart. I wasn't one of those awful kids who'd destroy their toys instantly and beg for more -- I'd play with them for a while, until I bored of them, and then they got the screwdriver treatment. I was going to turn my walkie talkie into a rocket, my toy pinball set into a laser cannon. Mostly this just meant that I took them apart, made lights blink as I attached wires to places where the wires weren't supposed to go, and made them make funny noises.
Now, for a while my parents thought I was destined to be an engineer or something, but they vastly overestimated the patience I would eventually show for doing my math homework. I liked opening things up and seeing what kind of weird things I could make them do. Never applied a lick of science to any of it.
In my adult life, these skills have served me oddly. I don't really know how to do anything the correct way, but I know how to fiddle with things without breaking them. And if I fiddle with things enough, I can usually get them working, or determine that I'm out of my depth.
Today I installed a dual phone jack in my new office. A red wire, a green wire, a brown wire, a yellow wire. One set on the phone jack, another set on the phone box outside. I guess if I knew ANYTHING about how phone wires worked, I would have saved myself about three hours of fiddling. I'd just pop the wires where the wires go, plug the phone and the modem in and be ready to go. Instead, I try "what happens if I plug the yellow wires here and the brown wires here...". I was astonished when I succeeded with permutation number 17 when I could have gone all the way to permutation 32.
I was even a computer repairman for a year. I didn't know anything, I just knew enough to test whether your monitor worked on another computer, whether your hard drive worked on another computer, ah, here's the problem! If, after two hours of fiddling, the computer wasn't fixed, my boss would wander into the back, hook something up to an oscilloscope and say "oh, you have to replace the clock crystal, duh!" He'd actually gone to computer repair school. But that's why he owned the shop and slept in 'til noon while I came in at 9:00 and made $7.50 an hour.
Thing is, I never put in that "prep" time when it comes to anything electrical. I never sat down to read the manual, instead I just figure anything designed for human use will be intuitive enough to figure out as I go along. Probably a bad life plan, but it gets me through the day.
And hey, I'm posting this with my modem, and can use the phone at the same time.