On Understanding Your Environment

Written in 1973, never published
©2022 Elder Road Books

WHERE I WORK as a production manager, I am generally considered patient and easy to get along with. I am a person who understands people; a person who does not lose his temper. Many people in our world today find this difficult. We are a mechanized society because machines are easy to work with. People are difficult.

On this I take issue with society.

I can understand people because people are fallible: just like me. I accept that, and can be patient about it. Even my wife thinks I’m patient when she wakes me up at 3:00 a.m. to ask me why she can’t sleep. I understand that because of some deep-seated psychological strain that built up during the day she is unable to sleep. I understand that some people can’t sleep when a dog barks—three miles away. I understand that some people can’t sleep simply because they know the alarm is going to ring at 7:00 in the morning. People, I understand.

But machines, I don’t understand.

Machines are not supposed to be fallible.

I don’t understand why fifty miles of tape is wrapped around the inside of my cassette recorder. I don’t understand why the hot water in the radiators is cold. I don’t understand why the vacuum cleaner sounds like it has an advanced case of lung cancer. I don’t understand why the toilet won’t flush in the middle of January. And I don’t understand why the car won’t start at 7:30 when I have a breakfast meeting at 8:00.

Speak to me car!

Did you have a bad night last night? Didn’t sleep? Do you have a cold in your carburetor? Are you tense? Irritable? Are you rebelling against the establishment? Why can’t I understand you?

Now don’t get me wrong. The reason you see me kicking my car in the bumper, throwing my electric saw against the barn, drowning the power lawn mower, or attacking the furnace with a hammer, is not because I’m not patient. I tried to understand them. And in some cases, I’ve even succeed.

Take the bathroom for instance. The Putta-Potty outhouse had only been in the driveway for three days by the time I got the septic tank dug out, two more days by the time the honey-dippers emptied it, and one week while I repaired the places in the bathroom floor where I started digging. How else was I to find where the septic tank was?

Now, two months later, I can honestly say I have a wonderful relationship with my bathroom. I gave it a beautiful new sink to replace the one I cracked when the pipe wrench slipped, new wallpaper where sewage had spattered it, a new carpet for obvious reasons, new shower because my wife wanted one, and new faucets because everything else was new, so why not?

It was a rewarding experience. I spend many restful moments a day in it. And when my wife gets out of traction and recovers from the sprained back she suffered from filling in the septic tank hole, and I grow back the fingers I lost while sawing paneling, and find the watch I lost down the drain, and my knuckles heal from the slipping pipe wrench, then I may try to start understanding my car.