Though I would describe myself as a technical person, my technical skills are mostly related to theoretical areas, such as math and computer science. When it gets to more practical fields, I’m not quite as useful. Furniture assembly, in-house repairs and even handling PC hardware quickly become difficult tasks. Basically, if it doesn’t have Ctrl + Z, I get nervous I mess something up and cause irreparable damage.
For a long time, this has been a major bane when anything about my bike didn’t operate properly. There’s this social standard that one should be able to fix their own bicycle, which has caused me endless hours of just screwing about in hopes of getting some usable result. Which usually worked in the end, by the way, but still took a lot of time and effort.
“At least I won’t have this problem once I get a car,” I thought optimistically. “Cars are so complicated, nobody will think strange of me when I bring it out for repairs.”
In the real world, however, it turns out to be perfectly doable to do some small fixes on a car.
For example, replacing a headlight.
Not too long ago, someone pointed out that our right headlight didn’t work. That wasn’t hard to validate. Fixing it however, seemed like a high-level task. Before I knew it, I was reading Wikihow articles and an online Skoda manual on replacing a headlight. We already had some spare bulbs in our possession, but I had to make sure they were also of the right type.
After meticulous research, I concluded that our bulb was in fact the right one, and I set to work.
I was done within 5 minutes.
It turns out replacing the light was actually pretty easy to do. Perhaps there’s some lesson here to not ward off anything that could, if extremely unlucky, could go wrong. Anyway: mission accomplished, fine avoided!