There are a lot of videos on YouTube about banging on your house, and making furniture, and related topics. Very, very few of them are any good. Many are downright destructive. For the most part, they’re produced by people who are fascinated with making videos, and watched by people who are interested in watching videos, not for doing anything productive in the real world.
Many young people today are hungry for information about practical things like fixing a dwelling. I salute them. Self-reliance is an important character trait, and in short supply recently. Home and Garden teevee shows are useless for this, but people watch them anyway. They showcase people who can’t do much more than host the show, but who exhort people to flip that house just like they (snicker) did. And, you know, an army of immigrants working off camera to do all the scut work. The result of people watching these shows is always highly visible in real estate listings in my neck of the woods, and probably in yours, too. The house is half torn apart, there are piles of oddly selected building materials everywhere, and there’s a foreclosed sign on the door. “All the hard work is already done,” the realtor will tell you with a straight face. Done wrong, I’ll tell you.
The genial fellow in this video is offering training wheels for your Schwinn before exhorting you to buy a Harley. He’s the rarest thing on the internet. Someone who might actually know what they’re talking about, and might actually help a few people hit their thumb with a hammer, and love every minute of it. And he seems to understand, without saying so, that the plastic bucket might be the most useful tool of the lot. After all, you can flip it over and sit on it when lunchtime rolls around.
[Related: Ten of The Eleven of My Top Ten Tools}
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I have used YouTube for car repairs. When suggestions include a simple one–like a gallon of lacquer for catalytic converter issues, I have followed the suggestions–generally successfully. When there are five or so complicated suggestions–especially when they involve jacking up the car–I take it to the shop. When it comes to being a shade tree mechanic, I am more shade tree than mechanic.
I have looked at YouTube for suggestions on how to stop a dog pulling at a leash. There are a wide variety of suggestions, suggesting there is no easy answer. The solution will probably be to get rid of the dog, whose tugging resulted in a friend’s falling and breaking her shoulder.
Moving to a home in NW Wyoming has led to some changes including the necessity of maintaining and updating an in-ground irrigation system. Being from the vast swamp of Minnesota, I’d never seen an in-ground irrigation system before. Now we freakin’ OWN one?
But after five years I’ve gotten to the point where, if I need to work on or expand a part of it, I can throw the right tools into a small (inherited) toolbox, walk out in the yard, and not come back until I’m done. I’ve got the tools I need, the fittings, hoses, tubing, and parts I need, and don’t forget the little knee-pad to keep from destroying my knees as I’m on the rock beds working on the stuff.
But the bucket is missing one critical tool: An old, beat-up, big, wooden-handled screwdriver.
That’s your pry bar, leaf-poker, spider-smasher (hey, we’ve got brown recluse here), paint-can opener, capacitor-shorter, and heck, you may even turn a screw with the darned thing. Next to a rock, tree-branch club, or a hammer it’s the closest thing to a universal tool mankind has ever made.