Solid Block of Ise

Alright, the topic isn’t exactly 100% true and I agree that it’s a bit to swooping. But I do think that sometimes humans are so amazingly dumb that it boggles my mind. Also, by “humans” I don’t mean the individual being but us as a collective whole.

Why?

I was spending time in the shower trying to fix our stupid shower-arrangement-thingamabobber. It’s this fancy piece of crap that was installed by the people who owned this dwelling before us, and I’m certain that they chose this thing on looks alone and in order to spice it up visually for whatever buyer was interested. It looks really impressive and adds some flair to the experience of taking a shower, but since it’s a under-engineered piece of crap it tends to break every now and then. Fixing it is relatively easy, essentially you take it off it’s brackets and re-attach the whose that came lose. No big deal.

Now, do me a favor and hold out your arms in front of you. Straight out. Now please count them for me. How many arms did you count?

Unless you’re outside of the statistical spectrum known as “normal” the answer to my question should be two. There are a few rare occasions when humans are equipped with more than two arms, but this is always due to something going wrong somewhere. If a human is equipped with more than two arms, the superfluous arms are never useful; they’re just annoying bits of meat and bone stuck somewhere they shouldn’t be. On the other side of the spectrum are humans who were born with two arms but lost one or both of them. They might have played a little too loose or fast with the chainsaw, or realized too late that juggling live handgrenades maybe wasn’t the best idea.

Thus, humans are never equipped with more than two functioning arms. That’s the absolut maximum of useful hand-equipped appendages that we are capable of commanding.

So why do humans insist on designing things that require more than two arms to install or operate?

Trying to put the thing in the shower back onto the brackets would’ve required that I grow an additional two or three arms. I got three of the screws in place, but the fourth one was at the weirdest angle and would’ve required at least four functioning arms to screw back in. Whoever the hell designed that thing in the first place would’ve received a fat lip if from me if I ever met them.

In fact, judging by my language and complete loss of calm they should count themselves lucky if all that happened to them was being skinned alive and then getting boiled in lava. The fat lip would just be a bonus.

So, I guess it was their good fortune they did not have to be present while I tried putting the damn thing back on it’s brackets. I gave up on getting the last screw in place and will wait until Ann-Sofie returns home from her trip, then have her help me hold the damn thing in place while I put the final screw in place.

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