It Seemed Like a Good Idea

Mark is relentless. No sooner had I finished putting up the ceiling fan, when he had another job for me to do. The mirror, he wanted me to take down the gigantic mirror on the living room wall. Now I have always disliked that mirror, but it was such a looming expanse of glass I never did try to remove it. Mark however, had the solution. He told me a friend of his had taken down such a mirror by covering the whole thing in tape, and then breaking it with a hammer. The whole thing would then roll gently down the wall into a nice bundle on the floor. That sounded plausible to me.

So yesterday I put tape all over the mirror, up and down, left to right. I then called my friend Russell over to stand by just in case I needed somebody to call 911 to come and stop the blood spurting from my leg. Armed with gloves, goggles, and a large rubber mallet, I took the first tentative swing at the mirror. Clang! Nothing happened, I was being too timid. "Here, let me do that.", Russell barked as he grabbed the mallet. Bang, bang, bang, and the mirror cracked. It then started slowly rolling down the wall. Bang, bang, bang, as Russell continued to smash the mirror we realized it was coming down faster, but not in a nice bundle.

As Russell and I jumped out of the way, the mirror fell forward smashing to the floor, tiny bits of glass flying out to all corners of the room. As dramatic as that was, most of the glass did stick to the tape, and it seemed that all we'd have to do is roll the mess up and carry it outside. Funny thing though, shattered glass is very sharp and heavy. It was way too heavy to pick up in one piece, and even with gloves I was worried about shards of glass slicing off body parts.

It took us thirty minutes working with two shovels, a large iron bar for leverage, and a tarpaulin to get that pile of glass out of the house, but we finally did it. Smashing the mirror like that really did sound like a good idea when it was presented to me, but it turns out that we had done it the hard way. If I had just taken out the four screws holding the mirror on the wall, had Russell taken one side, while I took the other, in one minute we could have carried it out in one piece. Now about that seven years of bad luck.