When the Bathroom Door is Broken, Just Fix It

There is a naughty elf loose in my house. Or, there’s a ghost of a carpenter past. Or, my kids are liars.


“Dad, the door to the bathroom in the basement is missing a hinge.”

“Missing?” I said, “Like, it is gone?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, ‘you don’t know?’” I queried.

“It’s just like, hanging there.”

And – my son was right; it was just hanging there by the top hinge.

I asked, “What happened?”

No response as they were dialed in to a game of Modern Warfare 3 on xBox.

“I said, what happened?”

“Umm – watch that guy by the building!!!! Umm, we don’t know.”

With a few years experience under my belt in dealing with distracted kids, I knew at this point my investigative inquiry must end. And it ended mostly because I know what happened – they and their cohorts, in a frenzy of adolescent knuckle-dragging broke the door. Ripped it off its hinge, to be exact, evidenced by the screw holes being shredded, rendering the existing wood screws inadequate.

Fixing this door, even to a layman like me is a simple task, as long as someone can take TWO MINUTES AWAY FROM THEIR VIDEO GAME TO HOLD THE FUCKING DOOR FOR ME! I went to the garage to grab new screws and a Philips head screwdriver. At least, that’s what I wanted to do. I forgot that Philips head screw drivers are what you need to adjust and tighten lacrosse stick heads…and apparently, after doing this, the screwdrivers are rendered useless and must be lost, leaving only a screwdriver that may be too small to install a screw in a pair of glasses.

But there is no use in asking about the screwdrivers either, the carpenter ghost probably needed them.