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If you're an expert, remember, not all are
© St. Petersburg Times, published December 26, 2000 Why do people who know how to do things assume that everyone else has the same ability? I guess writers are as bad as anyone else. We expect people to be able to have collective subjects agree with verbs and know the difference between the subjective and objective case. Other people expect us to know things like how many cylinders our cars have, what an offset Allen wrench looks like and why it is so important to make sure the plugged-up sink has been emptied before you disconnect the drain pipe. And gender lines don't help either. When somebody close to me told me she wanted a Brazilian bikini wax for Christmas, I prided myself on being hip enough to know what a bikini wax was, but couldn't understand why I had to send her to Brazil to get it done. For those of you out of the wax loop, a bikini wax is the removal of body hair that may be exposed by a bikini bathing suit, and whether it is Brazilian or not is a matter of degree. Apparently Brazilians have a reputation for skimpy bathing wear -- Girl from Ipanema and all that. They did, however, recently order covering the naked bottoms of girls on billboards advertising Playboy magazine. Hmmm . . . wonder how they would feel about Spring Hill's fornicating reindeer. But, back to the subject. I guess I should have known that my oven hadn't been working properly for two or three years, but I'm not much of an oven kind of guy. If it can't be microwaved, or prepared in one pot and eaten with a spoon while wearing only your underwear and standing over the kitchen sink, then I pretty much haven't eaten it in my house for a while. But, sure enough, we discovered by burning biscuits and broiling cookies that mine was out of whack. "All you need to do is replace the element," said the family fix-it man, not realizing that, to me, an element is part of the plot of a novel, play or short story and that to my more educated fiancee, it is something that chemistry professors always have charts of hanging over their blackboards (back when there were blackboards). "All you have to do is go get one," the fix-it man added, leading me to ask, "Where? The element store?" I don't do business with the appliance store that all of my neighbors patronize. I called there in 1974 to have someone come and fix my washing machine and am still waiting for them to show up. Besides, they hired a young woman acquaintance of mine a couple of years ago and part of her interview involved questions about whether she would mind lying to creditors and customers. I did know that if I was going to fix anything electrical, I would have to pull the main circuit breaker. (Yeah, I know there is a separate one for the range. That was then, this is now.) That led to one of those precious moments when a friend walked in, saw me with my head stuck in the oven, was momentarily startled and then realized that even I am not dumb enough to try to kill myself by sticking my head in an electric oven, holding a candle. He didn't ask for explanations he knew he wouldn't want to hear. About the same time, I discovered that my bedroom telephone had stopped working because the cats had chewed through the cord. It seems you have to have a special tool to put those little male couplers (a term you shouldn't use in Spring Hill where it might upset your neighbors) onto a telephone cable, and I not only have no special tools, I have no tools at all. It's okay. The guy at the electronics place sold me a cheater kit that you can use in place of the small couplers and which he said would be simple to install. He was wrong, of course, to assume, among other things, that I knew how to turn off the current to a telephone cable (yes, Virginia, there is electricity). And he was wrong when he said any idiot could do it. When will people realize that I am not just any idiot.
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