Okay, so it’s true that I don’t own a set of screwdrivers over a cordless drill. At least not at this time. But I used to, and I also know how to use them (thank you Dad!). This was put to the test when I was living in the UK, the flat we lived in was falling apart around our ears. Lovely quaint place – complete with a leaking shower, dripping timbers in the roof, a constantly clogging kitchen drain, failing gas main and inconsistent heater.
When my parents outfitted my tiny room in the flat they had given me a cordless drill. Or rather, my father had. No girl on her own should be without one he said. Despite the fact that I was a girly girl and I didn’t know one end of a drill from the other at that point. When I returned to the flat after a few months away to sort out the specifics of my student visa, I’d moved into one of the nicer rooms, but none of the issues with the place were repaired – and now there was a broken stair banister courtesy of the last tenant who had wrenched it off the wall when she was crawling home from the pub one night and neglected to try and fix it. I made the mistake of mentioning this railing to our landlord in an attempt to make sure that he knew that the damage had been done before I moved in so that it wouldn’t negate my deposit (money was very dear to me then, and the deposit wasn’t cheap) – I received a message back saying that since the previous tenant had not chosen to inform him of the damage at the time, and the girls I was living with hadn’t done so before I moved in either (I moved in last, when everyone else was already settled, all my rent negotiations etc were done long distance) – he was considering the damage our responsibility.
In other words, if it didn’t get fixed – bye bye deposit.
The other girls that I shared the flat with insisted that the damage couldn’t be repaired and we were just going to have to swallow it.
I was not about to accept that. That was my deposit dammit, and I needed it!
I used to work in a hardware store for a long time before I moved to the UK. This taught me the rudimentary basics of well…nuts and bolts. I pulled one of the bolts free of the railing that was hanging there looking forlorn, trucked down to the local everything-you-need-under-one-roof store and hunted out a match and a set of screwdrivers in case my cordless didn’t work and proceeded to sit cross-legged on the stairs for about twenty minutes (and yes, it would have taken my father about five, but that’s not the point!), grumbling, fitting washers, fitting bolts and securing screws.
The result of this was a railing securely fastened to the wall and three very grateful flatmates.
Go me.
And we won’t mention the black lace…