Why I Hate Machines

So I've been trying, by god, to figure out why the riding mower has been cutting on an angle, the right side leaving the grass higher than the left, and I've been crawling under the machine looking at the cutting deck from all angles and not able to understand the mechanism except it's obvious that it's not parallel to the ground, and my neighbor Ed was by and he's kind of a genius with machinery which I most definitely am not, and I said to him, Ed would you take look and see why the mower is cutting at an angle and he said, Well, here's one problem your left rear tire is flat which made me feel really dumb because I was so busy trying to understand the suspension system on the deck that I never even looked at the tire and I said, Flat, how can it be flat, I never run it anywhere but over the grass and he said, Well, look right there it's got a thorn in it, A thorn, I said, how can a thorn penetrate a Carlyle Super Tuff tire, and he said, Oh yeah they do that, but I can fix it, I'm busy today but I'll do it tomorrow I have a system you just push through what looks like knitting needle with sticky stuff on the end and pull it out, it will seal it right up, it's a tubeless tire isn't it? and I said Yes it is, and if you could fix it tomorrow that would be great, well next day he took the tire and tried it his way but he couldn't get it to hold air so he says Take it down to PTOs and they'll patch it from the inside, so I put it in the trunk of the car and drove to town and they fixed it and then I put it back on the axle, it has three small washers and one large washer and one of those spring nuts and I started the mower but by god the mower wouldn't move and I thought what the heck is going on here, I put everything back exactly as it came off and it was running just fine when I took it off so what could I possibly be doing wrong, I took the wheel off and put it on again and I still couldn't figure it out so I got in the car and drove over to Ed's, he was cutting wood but he stopped and I said, Ed, what's wrong with that lamb, why do you have him penned up all by himself and he said, you know how the lambs are always butting heads and pushing each other around, well I went out in the field and he was down, couldn't move a bit, so I took him home and I don't know whether his brains are addled or he's really hurt, I thought we'd better have him slaughtered but you can see he's doing better, getting up and eating so we'll hold off a day, and I said maybe he has a bad back like me, and he said, No, he's too young for a bad back, so I said, Well, maybe he has vertigo like you, which is not all that funny because Ed lost a week to vertigo last June, and he kind of laughed and said, Well, is your mower working now, and I said, Not exactly, the engine's fine and the belt turns but it's not moving frontwards or backwards and he said, How can that be, I'll come over and take a look so later that day he came by and sure enough it wouldn't move, so we took off the wheel again and studied it but I certainly couldn't figure it out and he couldn't either, everything looked good and perfect, we puzzled over it for a while and then he called the John Deere dealer in North Haverhill and the technician said maybe you lost the key when you took off the wheel and Ed said, O yes of course, we must have lost the key, I didn't think of that, and I said What the heck is the key and he said Well, in a lot of these machines the axle is broached which means there's a slot in it and a slot in the wheel and you have to have a key which is just a small piece of metal otherwise the axle will spin but the wheel won't rotate, so we looked all around for the lost key but couldn't find it and then Ed said, Look at your tire they didn't even mount it right, it's out of round, you'd better bring it back in and while you're there check if the key is in the shop somewhere, it might have stuck in the wheel because of the grease, so I took the wheel and put it in the trunk and drove back to PTOs and showed him that the tire was out of round, the owner was embarrassed about the bad job he had done and wouldn't even look me in the eye but he re-mounted the tire and when he finished I said, By the way, you didn't happen to find the key I lost it, and he said I'll look inside but he couldn't find it, so he said I'll make you another one which was nice of him though the key is only at most a 50 cent piece but it saved me from having to go to Napa Auto Parts or drive 30 minutes to North Haverhill to the John Deere dealer, so he made the part it took him only a couple of minutes, he had the stock he just had to cut and file a two inch piece, I brought it home and I put the key in the slot and put the wheel on, I had to use a board for a lever to get the rear of the mower up in the air and it was tricky because I held the board with my right hand and the wheel in the left but I managed alright and then I got on the tractor and started the engine and everything worked perfectly except that the tractor still wouldn't go either forward or backward, I took the wheel off and put it on again, but it still wouldn't work, so I walked over to Ed's and I said, Ed, I can't for the life of me figure it out, I got the key and it fit just perfectly but the machine still doesn't move, and he said It's got to work, it makes perfect sense, I said, Hey look, your lamb looks a lot better but why did you put a hog panel across your driveway, he said It's because of the dog, he's been getting out, tomorrow he's going to be snipped and that will quiet him down a bit, which is a good idea because the dog is far too friendly even to me and I don't particularly like dogs, he's a beagle mix, not as bad as their other dog which was a rescue dog a bulldog, very ugly in my opinion, which also got out and trotted over to the pottery where he was  seen running off with the Murrays' Silkie in his mouth, a Silkie is a fancy chicken, they charged Ed a hundred and sixty dollars for vet bills and mental anguish, the chicken died anyway, so Ed got out his rifle and shot the bulldog and then dug a hole four feet deep, he said that all the way down it was nothing but powder, it's been that dry the last few weeks, anyway Ed came by again and we tried the machine and it wouldn't go forward or backward and I was about to surrender and load up the damn thing and take it back to the dealer when we lifted both back wheels off the ground and suddenly the axle which hadn't been turning even though the belt had been turning started to spin, it must have been something about the gears that didn't mesh properly anyway we put the wheel back on again and I started it up and by god it ran as good as ever but I had wasted a whole day fussing with the mower just because it had picked up a goddamn thorn probably blackberry which is in brief why I hate machines

Comments

[Sarah]

I'm sure I would have enjoyed that as much as your other postings if only it had some punctuation. Sadly I had to give up a quarter of the way through.

[Sarah]

Dr M, could you read it out and post an audio clip on here? I'd love to hear it instead.

[Sean Robertson]

This might just be the longest run-on sentence ever written. LOL