A day with a mechanical success

Ever felt a degree of anxiety and not really know what was causing it? I find that happens often. Years ago I developed a system to deal with it. I sat down and made three lists of things that might be bothering me. One list was things I couldn’t do anything about. The second was of things that would take a good deal of time and effort to fix. The third was full of minor things that could be done quickly and easily if only I would just do them. Sometimes those lists grew quite long. Most often though, in the process I would discover the source of my anxiety.

After I had made the lists, though just making the list didn’t always satisfy the anxiety, I always felt a little more like I had things somewhat under control just having quantified the problem. Then I would look at the list of easy things and do one or two of them right away. That accomplished two things. The first was taking a couple items off the list of things that bothered me. The second was in accomplishing something, anything, it made those items on the middle list of more difficult problems a little more accessible and often with new confidence I would at least get things in motion to solve one or two of those. And there was the realization that I can’t really stop the war in Iraq so why let it bother me so much (the list of things I can’t do anything about).

Overall, it did serve to ease the anxiety and it got a few things done that needed doing.

Since I bought this Jeep, the turn signals have been funky. The right one would go on without blinking when the headlights were on. The left one would stop blinking when I hit the brakes. One day the odometer light flashed on and off with the turn signal. A few months ago I had a dealer look at it. After charging me $100 for the diagnosis, they wanted $180 to replace something called the multi-function switch.

I deferred. Then during the second great Alaska relatives trip, one day both the brake lights and the turn signals blew out fuses. I managed to get the brake lights working by leaving the fuse out for the turn signals and we went on with the trip, but the Jeep has been sitting here since then waiting for me to fix it. Mind you, going into the wiring in a steering column is not a chore for the timid. Today, calm and collected, I went out and took the assembly apart just to see how it would go and it went fairly easily. That accomplished I went and bought a new multi-function switch, put it in and everything now multi functions the way it is supposed to. Big deal?

Well, to begin with, it is one item off that anxiety list that has been on there for a year. Jeep is functional again, and, at a cost of $70 and about an hour's work instead of $170 and a day lost going to Anchorage and waiting for it to be done. And, best of all, on a rainy, cloudy dark and dismal day, a mechanical success makes everything seem all right.