There’s always one piece left over. ALWAYS. You think you’re done, I always think I’m done, but I’ve forgotten something, every single time. It’s become a cliche at this point. It’s like my brain automatically removes one thing out of everything I do and stores it to one side for…reasons. My Christmas jigsaw was a nightmare this year because I found myself missing one corner piece, several edge pieces and the church spire. Do you know how annoying it is to get to the end of a jigsaw and realise that the church spire is missing, and you CANNOT find the piece? I wanted to cry.
I want to cry a lot, come to think of it. I was putting away my tools at the end of of the job, and I have under tray drawers with designated spots to at least mitigate some of this problem, and I noticed that my spirit meter was missing. Where did it go? Who steals a spirit meter, and how would they have done so when i was working on the second floor of an unfinished building…by myself? I guess it fell into the same ethereal black hole as the puzzle pieces, and all those socks.
I try. I really do try. It’s the reason I got toolbox central locking in the first place, so there’s no excuse for my tools going walkabout. Kinda sick of it happening, particularly when I spend money on that stuff to do a good job and be a responsible tradesperson who doesn’t source their tools from some place cheap. Maybe I should start, because I’ll probably end up replacing them all anyway. It feels like I’m being stalked by an invisible, inter-dimensional portal that eats my possessions. One day it’s the aluminium accessories off the side of my ute, the next it could be…I don’t know, the entire ute. My dog. My girlfriend. This is a hungry portal, and one day it’ll get tired of just gnawing at the sides of my ute.
-Rif