Basic Carpentry

The elevator in our building used have a handle on its door that was attached using four screws. Now it so happened that it is very boring to actually wait for the elevator to come down from the top floor, or to wait at (my) sixth floor foyer for it to come up from the ground floor.

I'd gotten into the habit of loosening the screw (always the top right one) on both floors with my thumb (nail) while I was waiting out my wait. It provided me with immense satisfaction to know that I could undo a screw that people had to use a screwdriver to place there, with my bare thumbnail.

I guess, the other day, I'd gone too far when I came round the corner and grabbed for the handle, and by hand closed around nothing. That's right. Just because I'd loosened the screw too far and dropped the screw, that then proceeded to roll under the ground floor door and disappeared into the elevator well, someone had taken a screwdriver to it and made off with the other three screws and the handle to boot as well.

What came as an even bigger surprise was to find, a couple of days later, that all the door handles on all the floors had now been replaced with ones fixed in with nails rather than screws. Someone obviously took the missing screw too personally.

But the anecdote apart, this incident taught me how little even carpenters know about basic carpentry. When you want to put a screw into wood, the way to do it is to make a thin (2mm across) and just as shallow hole in the wood, and then to let the screw do the rest of the work. Not make a 4mm hole the length of the screw just to make the job easier for yourself. It is no wonder the screw didn't hold.

Which leaves me as to what past-time I should now resort to while waiting for the elevator to arrive. Grow a claw hammer out of my toes?