Son of Sam

Sam is the neighborhood handyman, and is constantly informing me of the various projects he has been hired to do around town. So it was an obvious choice on my part to hire him to put up our new living room ceiling fan. I know it isn't so hard to do, but I was beat from the last few weeks of renovating and redecorating. I figured I'd let some body else do it. It turns out a monkey could have done a better job than Sam.

The first obstacle was removing the old fan. It was installed in some kind of fashion where the pipe it hung on disappeared into a hole in the ceiling. From the other room I heard the whine of a tool. Stepping into the living room to see what was happening, I was greeted by a shower of sparks cascading down on our living room furniture.
"No problem Alan, I'm just cutting this thing out of here."

When I checked in a little while later, Sam had removed the old fan and was busy preparing the mounting hardware for the new one. I was amazed. Sam had laid a small piece of wood inside the hole in the ceiling, and was shooting screw after screw up through the plaster, trying to secure a solid place to hang the fan. The only problem was there were no rafters nearby, only plasterboard. He was shooting screws into nothing, into the air above the ceiling.

The thought went through my head that maybe he has some kind of grand plan that I just don't understand. He said he knew what he was doing, and I decided to let him continue. When I returned to check on his progress a little later I found that the fan was now mounted, and wired up. It looked awful, it wobbled when you touched it, and when I turned on the electricity nothing happened. The fan didn't turn, the light didn't light. I just wanted it to end.
"How about we call it a day, and get some rest. Come back tomorrow with a fresh perspective, and we'll get this thing done." Sam had been working on it for six solid hours by then, and I wanted him out of there.

Early the next morning I finished the job myself. I pulled the fan back down, I opened the ceiling, screwed a two by four between two rafters, and attached an electrical box to that. I then securely hung the fan from that box, and wired it correctly this time. I then closed up the hole I made in the ceiling, and finished putting the whole thing together. To Mark's amazement the thing worked. I was not so amazed. I always knew that I could do the job. I just didn't want to.