I think it's called inertia

Our back door has a lock on the knob and a dead bolt. The dead bolt hasn't worked for maybe 13 or more years. Wayne saw no urgency to fix it, I guess, since the lock on the knob worked. He would say he didn't know how to fix it.

Hmmm.

Lately the door shuts funny or doesn't shut. Like, I would come down in the morning and find it not latched. So I began to make sure that I shut it tight, and I looked at the dead bolt. I mean I really looked.

I thought I could see the problem. Fixing it would require removing the brass plate, hammering the dented part straight, and re-attatching the brass plate. That might do it, I thought, if the door hadn't shifted too much.

So the other morning, I followed those steps, and now the dead bolt works. And I am pretty proud of myself, you know.

I said, "Oh Wayne, you could have done that. Why didn't you?" I also said, "Oh, Carol. Forget it. The thing is fixed."

I told Jim, my home teacher, the dead bolt story, leaving out the parts about Wayne.

He said, "I can top that."

Jim: We've lived in our house 20 years. In one place, the roof comes together and forms a little valley that the water runs down when it rains. Under that spot is a metal box [it's permanent], and when it rains, the water drips onto that box. Drip, drip, drip, drip.

Still Jim: The other night we were in bed and my wife said, "What is that noise? Why can't we get rid of that noise?"

Jim is not an old guy, and he's capable, and so on. But he is deaf in one ear and is losing hearing in the other. The drip, drip, drip, drip, does not bother him; he can't hear it.

But the other night,
Jim: So I got out of bed, went outside, and put a big rock on top of the metal box. When I got back in bed, she asked, "What did you do? How did you fix that? That noise has driven me crazy for years, every time it rains."

Jim explained what he had done. They were both happy.

To me he said, "Twenty years, Carol. Twenty years."