Everyday Buts

Issue #27 of The Two But Rule

Image by MidJourney: Fixing The Ceiling Fan

Happy holidays to our readers in the US. And to everyone dealing with parenting this summer, I thought this issue should be for you.

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Just because a problem or opportunity is subject to the confines of our personal lives doesn’t mean it can’t be frustratingly complex. In the grand scheme of global conflict and calamity, a poopy diaper might not seem like a big problem. But tell that to a single parent in the middle of delivering a career-making speech on a livestream with a one hundred people watching. Especially when there’s no help in the house, the baby is screaming, and it’s one of those diaper-destroying blow-out poops that shoot up the child’s back and into their hair. 

Fixing the Fan

The poopie diaper problem may actually have no workable solutions under the current laws of physics, but here’s a challenge from my personal experience that turned out to strain my buts (and my back).

My youngest child recently grew tall enough to pull the chain that controls the ceiling fan in their room. So, of course, they promptly broke it. The chain was made of those little metal beads connected to each other by little metal threads. The chain broke in a way that left the end connected to the on-off switch hidden inside the fan’s metal housing.

My Intention: Fix the fan. Earn points with my spouse. Possibly get lucky.

But, I couldn’t get to the tag end of the chain stuck inside the housing in order to reconnect it. BUT I could, if I managed to take off the housing and access the inside. After fumbling around trying to figure out how to do that, I managed to get the housing off. I’m happy to say that I did this without pulling the fan clean out of the ceiling when I fell off the chair that I was using as a step ladder. 

But even with the housing off, the part of the chain still connected to the fan was now too short to push through the housing, which I had to do in order to connect it to the rest of the chain that had broken off. BUT I figured that I could reverse the problem and push the broken-off part of the chain through from the outside of the housing and reconnect it that way.

But because of the way the chain was made, it was wobbly and wouldn’t go through the weirdly long tunnel in the housing simply by pushing it. Why was there a tunnel in the housing and not just a simple hole that I could have easily pushed the damn chain through? That’s a mystery well outside the scope of this article to address. BUT in a flash of 2Buts insight, I scurried off to the kitchen, found a toothpick, and connected it to the chain with some tape. Then I pushed the rigid toothpick through the tunnel, grabbed it on the other side, and pulled it through until the chain emerged. From there, it was a simple matter of using the little metal connector bracket that comes with these kinds of chains to attach the broken segments and reattach the housing. Voila! I fixed the fan in just six buts. #6Buts

But, now my shoulders were on fire, and I tweaked my back by holding my arms above my head for twenty minutes. BUT I had Advil. Ok, so … eight buts. (Getting credit with my spouse for my heroic act, and caching in on those credits? That involved many more buts.)